Email migration
We know that some organizations have been reluctant to switch to Google Apps because they did not want to make the transition and leave valuable data behind. If you've yet to fully deploy Google Apps in your organization, the switch just got a lot easier.
As of today, Google Apps domains on the Premier and Education Editions have access to a new migration tool that makes it easy for administrators to transfer all their users’ email data from an IMAP server to Google Apps. Using the new migration tool is easy. Just click here and follow the instructions (this link points to the 'Advanced Settings' tab of the control panel). After migrating your email, each message displays the original sender, recipient, and date. The folder structure of your old mailbox is translated to Gmail labels.
Super cool! I use Google Apps to host my email on my headsphere.net domain and was always quite keen to have all my services out on the GoogleCloud, but since about 2001 all my email was on an IMAP server at fastmail.fm. Up to now there was no (easy) way of importing my mail archive from Fastmail into Gmail. Now all I need to do is upgrage my Google Apps account to a premium account($50USD) and import away!
3 comments:
I've been thinking of doing the same thing, but I am not sure if fastmail's IMAP services are compatible with Google's migration tool (apparently not all are). I'd be very interested in knowing how this turned out for you.
I managed to complete the migration successfully a few weeks ago. All the messages were migrated successfully however there were a couple of small problems.
Firstly was the fact that I had downgraded my Fastmail account to a free one, which had the impact of enforcing a bandwidth limit on transfers. About 90% through the migration I received an error message telling me Google couldn't access Fastmail. Trying again 24 hours later resolved the problem.
A nice touch there was, re-attempting the migration did not duplicate the already migrated messages - it identified the dups and did not re-migrate them.
The second issue I have encountered is in the way attachments are handled. I haven't looked into this in much detail but it looks like a lot of the migrated attachments have lost their mimetypes and file extensions, so a lot of them (not all) are just named winmail.dat. Not sure what pattern there is to it, but will look into it at a later date.
Apart from those issues, the whole process went very smoothly and I'm now ready to ditch Fastmail and migrate my life to the google-cloud. Oh and the other cool thing is you can downgrade your Google apps account back to a free account after you have fininished the migration :-)
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