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.

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.