Migrating from Gmail to Google Apps

Here I hope to help you avoid the pain of trying to migrate a Gmail account (or two) to Google Apps without knowing how, which appears to be completely undocumented and unsupported. There are various other methods but none of them worked for me, so here we are.

One caveat with this method: all of your email will be “archived”, meaning if you’re one of those people that keeps everything in the inbox, your inbox will be empty when all is said and done. Some people think that’s a good thing, and I agree – though the line between organizing 99% of your mail and 100% happens to overlap the line between sanity and insanity. The line between love and hate is also nearby.

Preparations

1. You’ll need to set up a Google Apps “Premier Edition” account. They have a 30-day trial so you can do all of this and then cancel before being charged.
2. Set up your user and your email account.
3. Recreate your gmail filters and labels before migrating – this way your migrated email will be filtered and labeled as it comes in. Contacts can be exported/imported easily.

Migration

1. Go to the Google Apps dashboard > Advanced Tools > Set up mail (IMAP) migration.
2. Set up the Google Apps <> Gmail connection like so:
   
   You can of course change the number of connections but it should probably be kept low, otherwise you risk a lockdown in sector 4.
3. Enter your Account username and password and test the connection. You should only see “All Mail” under “Folders Found”. (This is important because the migration program thinks labels are folders, so if a particular email has 3 labels attached to it and if you were to import the entire gmail account, you’d end up with 3 duplicates of that email.) Click Start migration. Enjoy knowing that you didn’t have to waste hours figuring all of this out on your own. You bastard.
4. The migration should create two new labels, “Migrated” and “Migrated/All Mail”. After migration is 100% complete, delete those labels and you’re done.