Keyboard Face

I recently got accepted for the beta of “Gmail for your Domain” – a service that allows you to have professional email addresses like [email protected] instead of coolbob123@ gmail.com.

Then came the problem of over 6000 emails that I had in my current Gmail account that I now wanted in my new Gmail account. How to migrate the emails? I was surprised that I got so many good answers when I searched “migrating gmail account”. I ended up trying variations of all the solutions given in the top 3-4 results, but they all ended up being too complicated, not working, etc.

Because it was such a pain, I thought I’d share my solution. I finally ended up using Mark Lyon’s GMail Loader (GML), which is by far the best utility out there for it.

I had to do the following:

• Download my mail from my old Gmail account into clean account in OutlookExpress
• Find out where OutlookExpress was storing my mail (Tools -> Options -> Maintenance -> Store Folder)
• Go to that location and copy the .dbx file (and place it somewhere I could locate it easily) I wanted to upload to my new Gmail (inbox.dbx) in my case
• Download a utility called DBXConv and run it on my newly acquired dbx file. It’s a command line utility so I simply had to run “dbxconv inbox.dbx” and it converted it to the much more agreable mbx format.
• Run the Gmail Loader
• It didn’t work right away for me. The default SMTP server gsmtp57.google.com doesn’t work. I then made the mistake of assuming that Google had disabled all their SMTP servers that would work with a program like this. I then tried my ISP’s SMTP, my web host’s SMTP, and several other SMTP’s. They all didn’t work (I think because they all didn’t allow open relays or something.). If I had read the instructions all the way, however :), I would have done what he suggested and it would have worked without all the extra flailing. I did what he said and I used mob.net’s mx tool to find a working Google SMTP server, entered that in and it worked!!
• Now all that was left was to upload the 6,000+ emails, which ended up taking about 10 hours. Good thing it was a three day weekend!