ghacks Technology News

Import Email Mailboxes Into Gmail

gmailThere are three different kinds of email users these days; Those that work with desktop email clients, those that work with online email clients and those that use both email solutions. Moving from one email client to another is not always as easy as it sounds, especially when moving from a desktop email client to an online client or vice verse. The main problem that arises for most users is to find a way to move their existing emails to the new email provider to be able to access these emails there as well.

Single emails can be forwarded to the new email account but what about mailboxes with hundreds of mails? Enter gExodus, a standalone program for the Windows operating system that can import email mailboxes into Google Mail. The program supports the mbox format which is supported by many desktop email clients like Mozilla Thunderbird but not Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. The easiest solution for Outlook users is therefor to install Thunderbird and import the email first into this email client before importing them into Gmail. Another possibility is to use the DBX to MBOX converter, a command line utility that has been created for that purpose.

google mail

The email importer itself is a portable software program. The email address and mbox file have to be added to the program by the user. An option is to add a label to the import to make it distinguishable from the rest of the emails in the Gmail inbox. It might also be required to change the default Gmail mail server to another one. A click on MX lookup for Gmail will open a website that is listing several Gmail smtp servers.

Each email is imported individually by the software program afterwards. The process can take quite some time as it takes between 10-20 seconds to transfer one email to Gmail.

Enjoyed the article?: Then sign-up for our free newsletter or RSS feed to kick off your day with the latest technology news and tips, or share the article with your friends and contacts on Facebook or Twitter.

Related Articles:

Gmail Adds Email Import
How to import mail into your gmail account
Gmail Enables Mail And Contact Import For All Gmail Accounts
How To Import Gmail Contacts Into Thunderbird
Use Gmail As Email Backup Space



About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.

Author: , Sunday May 3, 2009 -
Tags:, , , , ,


Responses so far:

  1. jp says:

    you can also use IMAP

  2. Rarst says:

    I don’t know if any mail client can pull this off but when I was moving to gmail in Opera M2 I just dragged mail from old mailboxes to gmail and it was all transferred.

    Old boxes weren’t IMAP, gmail box was IMAP.

  3. haris says:

    sign my new gmail

  4. Rick says:

    Yup, I’ll agree with the others. This sounds like a decent way to do the job, but the normal way (which works great) is just to use IMAP.

    1. Set up gmail as an IMAP account in your desktop mail client.
    2. Drag your mail (folders or a whole mailbox) into your gmail IMAP account.
    3. Enjoy.

Leave a Reply   Follow Ghacks   Subscribe To Comment Rss

Subscribe without commenting

© 2005-2012 Ghacks.net. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - About Us