If you’ve ever been stuck using another email service and want to move over to Gmail, importing all of your mail is a real pain in the ass. Think Apple’s Mail client tied to, say, an exchange account. Today, Google open sourced two projects that’ll help make moving over much easier.
Here’s what the team said today about it:
Do you have an old Thunderbird mail archive that you downloaded from an old email account? Do you want to move those old messages to Gmail so that you can use the Gmail app on your phone and still have access to everything? Then maybe mail-importer is for you! The project aims to make it easy for users to import mailbox files from their computer to Gmail. The project is in early development and only has command-line support right now.
Or maybe you are a Google Apps administrator trying to import all of your users’ old mbox files into Google Apps for Work? Then import-mailbox-to-gmail is probably what you’re looking for. It is a Python script that will do bulk imports of multiple mailboxes into multiple accounts in a domain. It’s admin-managed, so your users won’t have to individually import their archives. To migrate from other types of archives or mail servers to Google Apps, see the Help Center.
The two tools, mail-importer and import-mailbox-to-gmail, are available on GitHub for free.
Since the tools are in early development there aren’t any GUIs for them yet; they’re all command-line-based. That doesn’t mean you can’t get an assist from your friendly IT person, though.
I implore you to send the link along to that person if you feel like you’ve got a pile of email that would be awesome to have within Gmail for searching and acting upon.