Upload your Outlook Emails to GMail

I swore this blog was not about “lifehacks” or productivity tools…but when I searched for how to do this task, I found outdated advice on lifehacker, so I had to write my own…

Suppose that you have decided to embrace the web, so to speak, and want to use Google Mail to replace your existing desktop-based Outlook. In my case, I have Verizon downloading to Outlook 2003. Sometimes I use their terrible netmail to access my email remotely. I also have my phone set up to download new mail. Annoyances abound but the key limitations are:
If I forget and leave the outlook client open on my home pc, then all new mail is immediately downloaded there, so I can’t see it on my phone or via the web form.
Once the mail is in my desktop client, I lose the ability to reply to people or access the history of conversations remotely.
The verizon netmail client is buggy; countless composed emails have been lost due to session timeouts.

I determined that I could use GMail and set it up to fetch my verizon mail into the GMail account, and I could also configure GMail to send emails from my verizon account. But I really wanted to upload all the old email and contact information into GMail to make the search and contact stuff useful.

I found an article on lifehacker, but it’s a mess. Some guy wrote a tool that will upload mBox formatted email (what’s that?) from Thunderbird (what’s that?). So, you can download another tool to convert your .pst files into mbox format…yuck. Headache city. Then, I did more searching and found this longer article that takes a long time to describe what is actually a fairly simple and brilliant workaround.

Microsoft Outlook allows you to set up multiple email accounts with multiple protocols. For example, you could have an Exchange mailbox (work) and a POP-based server (home). You could also attach Outlook to an IMAP mail server…Google supports IMAP for accessing the othwerwise web-based email. So here is the solution:

Enable IMAP support in your Gmail account, then add that account to your Outlook client. Then, drag and drop the email from your existing accounts into GMail.

Here is the step-by-step how-to:

Configure GMail  to use their Mail Fetcher to retrieve and send mail through your POP account (e.g. verizon):
1. Login to GMail
2. Click on the Settings link at top right
3. Click on Accounts tab
4. Under “Get mail from another account” click “add…”

see the Mail Fetcher link above for help

Note the checkbox to “leave mail on server.” When you are ready to have GMail be your primary mode of email, you will want to uncheck that box so the mail does not accumulate at Verizon (because you will no longer be running Outlook and downloading it.).

This step achieves what I already had on my phone and through the Verizon netmail. Now to do the fun stuff.
Enable IMAP in GMail: Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, Enable IMAP.
Now, open Outlook and add a new account:
choose Tools, Email Accounts to start the wizard
select Add a new email account, Next
choose IMAP, Next

To complete these configuration screens, you should consult the documentation on the google site for your particular Outlook (or other) client. See these configuration instructions from Google, or more help on IMAP from Google

When you complete and finish the new account wizard, you will see a new folder icon for imap.google.com at the top level of your Outlook folders. Now, you can exlore that folder, just like any other, and move email messages back and forth.

After setting this up, I selected 2000+ emails from my local inbox and dragged them across to GMail, a process that took over an hour to complete over a high speed connection. If you have a large amount of email…do it in manageable chunks. And be judicious about what you move–I just wanted to seed google with the most recent stuff to give me something I could search and tag and start using effectively. I also copied my sent items folder contents to the GMail sent items folder.

Actually using GMail is a subject for another tutorial–and I am sure there are plenty out there. But I found this approach of transferring my email gave me something useful to work with and eased the transition.