Scenario: You have created your email account with Google Apps and are satisfied with its performance. You now intend to migrate completely to your Google Apps account and wish to close your old email account in due course. However you have a lot of contacts in your Address book and important read/unread email correspondences in the inbox of your old account that you have also labeled and you do not wish to delete. Well now you can easily transfer all your old emails, contacts and labels from that account to your new Google Apps account.
Introducing - Google Email Uploader
"The Google Email Uploader is a open source desktop utility for Microsoft Windows. It uploads email and contacts from desktop email programs (like Microsoft Outlook®) into your Google Apps mailbox. It preserves information such as sent dates and sender/recipient data, as well as the folder structure used by email programs."
Before you can upload your emails to your new inbox, you will need to have the mails to be physically present on your Hard disk. It means that you will have to transfer all the old mails from your old account using POP3. IMAP won’t work with Google Email Uploader. If not using any email client already, I would suggest that you use Thunderbird. It is a free, open source email client that I personally find to be a very convenient tool to use for my e-mails and RSS subscriptions.
Once al your old emails have been transferred to your inbox, run the uploader program.
You shall be greeted with a screen that asks you to click on the Next button. (Can Google make things any more simpler)
On the next screen you will be asked to login to your target Google Apps account. I had created an account example@shubhspace.co.cc and so login accordingly.
Once your login has been validated, you will be taken to the screen that shows you the list of inboxes that is present in your email client (Thunderbird in my case).
Select the inbox that you wish to upload to your Google Apps account. Clicking on the inbox to be uploaded will automatically select the POP3 server that will be queried. Once this is done, clicking on the Next button will take you to another screen where you will again have to take a few decisions (Using these innocuous softwares, Google is training the future crop of Management executive). If you have already read the mails then you may want to select the Archive everything option.
Clicking on upload will commence the upload process and you shall be shown the progress of the upload.
Once the upload process is over it shall inform you of the same. You are informed that the mails will take 48 hours to appear in your new inbox, which I found to be an overly safe guideline. Anyway, you may wait for 48 hours before logging into your Google Apps inbox.
On logging in your inbox that will look something like this.
(click on the image to view a larger sized image)
All your mails from the old inbox have been transferred to your new Google Apps mail inbox with the Imported/Inbox label attached to each. If you had contacts in your old inbox and labeled your mails, they too will be shown here.
There you go, all your mails, contacts and labels have now been transferred to your new Google Apps email account with just a few mouse clicks. Any doubts, queries, criticisms could be put in the comment below and I shall try to address them to the best of my ability.
Note:
If you are a user of a Yahoo! India email account (@yahoo.co.in) or a Gmail user, then you can use the POP3 feature for free. However, other Yahoo! account holders (@yahoo.com) will either have to pay to use this service or may use a freeware tool called YPOPs! to access your Yahoo! mails from any email client. Hotmail users too have to pay in order to make use of the POP3 feature. A service called IzyMail does exist that allows you to do the same with multiple email account provider, but it is a paid service. Though they say Free registration, I am not sure what it means when you have to pay to use their service. I haven’t had the need to use it yet.