Anyone know a good way to move email from a generic IMAP based host to Gmail/Google Apps?

Forums › IT Pro and developers › Anyone know a good way to move email from a generic IMAP based host to Gmail/Google Apps?

timmmay

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#162139 30-Jan-2015 12:50

I'm moving a friend from HostGator email (IMAP) to Google Apps for business. There are three email accounts going into two google accounts, around 2GB of email and 20,000 messages. They don't mind if only the past year of email goes across.

I've been using the Google Apps migration system but:
- It's incredibly slow (24 hours to get to 90% if it gets that far). Right now it's averaging about 1-2 emails per MINUTE. It was doing better yesterday.
- It freezes before it finishes, anywhere between 10% and 95%

You can run it more than once but it starts again, though fortunately email isn't duplicated. I've asked Google for support but it may take a while.

I've considered:
- Thunderbird : drag and drop (uses my bandwidth, will probably create duplicates)
- ImapSync: command line, can't be bothered
- GAMME: think it relies on Outlook which I don't have

Anyone have any thoughts/advice/experience? I'll possibly have to give up on the Google Migration, use Thunderbird, and they'll have to accept duplicates :(

Dynamic

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#1225332 30-Jan-2015 13:15

MigrationWiz is a likely candidate. Online service that has saved us a lot of hassle which equals saving a lot of labour cost.

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timmmay

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#1225367 30-Jan-2015 13:47

Not too bad value at $12 per migration, looks like it gives you ten tries too. I might do that in future if the person I'm helping wants to pay for it, but this one isn't.

timmmay

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#1225402 30-Jan-2015 14:18

Hey, Google called me when I logged a case! They said there's a 10,000 message per day limit per account that the migration system is included in. If it stalls you leave it 24 hours and it should restart, in theory. I'll give that a shot.

As for speed he said it was a shared resource and sometimes slows down.

raytaylor

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#1244391 22-Feb-2015 20:22

Yeah I would have thought that google offers a migration app.

We are big kerio users and they have an IMAP<>IMAP app that i think you might also be able to use to push emails to another email server.

I think google has a weird implementation of IMAP folders - since they dont use folders as such, they use "labels" which is really just one of those lovely annoying silicon valley improvements to our lives.
So anyhow, an IMAP to IMAP migration program may not work? I am not sure.

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timmmay

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#1244434 22-Feb-2015 21:02

The answer was there's a limit to the number of emails that can go in and out of a google account each day. If you leave the migration running it'll pick up when it can, even if it takes days. I have no idea how you do a corporate migration, I could only do one at a time.

Mattmannz

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#1244687 23-Feb-2015 11:53

Migration WIZ is definitely the easiest way to go but as you say it's chargable.

I have had a lot of issues with Google's imap implementation, for the cost Office 365 is pretty close and feature wise quite a lot better.

Matt.

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#1248467 28-Feb-2015 14:27

+1 For all the references to MigrationWiz. I've used this product a lot for on premises to Exchange Online/Office 365 migrations. It'll also attempt to repair corrupted mail items as part of the process.