Frustrated with two accounts? Want to transfer your mails from one Gmail account to another? Why? Because it could be helpful in certain situations like – #1. Your email address is unprofessional and now you want to change to some other neat address. #2. You are receiving huge amount of junk and now want to use new one. Therefore, you want to migrate emails from old Gmail account to new one. #3. You got multiple active Gmail accounts and now you want to use only one Gmail account. So in this condition, you want to transfer old emails from multiple places and paste them into newly-active Gmail account. We can approach this problem with 3 different ways. Mail transferring methods depends on how you want it and how much you want it? It could be as simple as setting a filter or as complex as downloading all mails to computer and uploading them to new mailbox. Let’s look at 3 possible solutions to transfer emails between two Gmail accounts:
- Set up a Filter for Forwarding Old and New Mails This is one of the simplest method that I have found. All you need to do is set up a filter that forwards all incoming mails to your new Gmail account and then checking the “Also apply filter to x conversations below” checkbox. This is a very simple method but its effectiveness is not guaranteed though, it is working for me. However, there are two disadvantages of this method. One, you need to keep alive your old account. Second, mails send to a list that you are a part are not forwarded to your new account so you need to come back to your old account periodically. Note: If you don’t want your old messages then you can choose auto-forwarding from settings, which is lot more easy and a sure-shot way to get mails from old accounts.
- Leverage POP for Downloading and Transferring Mails This method is strongly recommended for comprehensive transferring. You can leverage Gmail’s fantastic POP ability to download mails from one account to another account. Just follow these steps – In Your Old Account
- Go to Forwarding and POP/IMAP option in Gmail Settings. 2. Select the first option Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded) in the POP Download section. 3. Save your settings. In the New Account
- Goto the Accounts and Import option in Gmail Settings. 2. Click on Add POP3 email account button from the Check mail using POP3 section. 3. Fill up your old account information in the pop-up. Choose all defaults fields except POP server to pop.gmail.com. 4. Save your settings. You are done. In this method, mails will not be transferred at once and it may take few hours if your inbox is gigantic. Unfortunately Gmail chat history will not be transferred. This is the best method I have seen for complete migration. It is often referred as Mail Fetcher. GMail provides complete support for this here.
- Migrate Completely – Even Moving Your Labels with You One common problem of migration is that all mail labels are lost. Even though, you have transferred your accounts successfully, you will end up in unorganized mailbox. Guys at lifehacker has taken this seriously and they have come up with a lengthy but very effective process to migrate mailbox completely here. Basically, they have removed all multi-label mails, applied them a single label and then used desktop client to drag-n-drop mails between various folders. You can find complete tutorial here. Any of these 3 methods can be used for moving emails from different Gmail accounts to single consolidated one which will be always in sync. Choose the one that best suites your needs.
