SMTP

So you're like us and have decided that there just isn't anything better than Gmail spam filtering and are wondering "why reinvent the wheel?" I mean, there's lots of reasons to switch to Gmail, but the spam filtering is just amazing. That means you're probably to the point of trying to figure out how to move your hundreds of email messages to the Gmail account you've setup.

Here's what we're doing. We've decided to use Google Mail through Google Apps. It allows us to point our domains MX records towards Google and collect mail for our domains at email addresses we've setup through Google. The cool part is, that the email addresses are actually at our-domain-name.com and we're able to check email at mail.our-domain-name.com using the well-known Gmail web interface.

But back to the point... Migrating mail from an email server to Gmail.

Currently, Google Apps offers a range of options to ease your migration from Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. However, this solution does not help the server admin who's not using Microsoft's products. We also located instructions for IMAP mail migration, however, it's only available for Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, Cyrus IMAP Server, Courier-IMAP, and Dovecot applications. That brings us to our solution, a workaround if you will:

1. Make sure the original email account is accessible via IMAP.
2. Log into the newly created Gmail account and turn on IMAP access.
3. Install an email client that supports IMAP. We used Apple Mail. A good windows alternative would be Thunderbird.
4. Configure the mail client to access both email accounts via IMAP.
5. Drag and drop email from the old email account to the new Gmail account.
6. Wait for your mail to finish transferring.

That's it! A few easy steps and you're done.

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