Exporting Email and Chats from Your Old Gmail Account

When I established my new domain, I used Google Apps to create new e-mail accounts for my business. My dream was to export all of my old e-mail and chat transcripts out of my username@gmail.com account and into my username@jayallenwrites.com account.

Consider my dreams dashed. There’s no good way to export your chat history from a Gmail account. (Notice I said no good way. I’ll discuss the bad way in a moment.) The best I was able to do was import all of my old e-mail from my old account into my new account, and keep the old account around for reference.

Importing Email from Your Old Gmail Account

I clicked on Settings in my new Gmail account, and then on the Accounts tab. Here, I added my old Gmail account by clicking Add an Account You Own. I entered my old Gmail address in the text box dialog, and clicked Next. Gmail automagically filled out all of the technical details for me. Such a sweet young lad.

Once I linked my accounts, Gmail began sucking in all of my old email from my gmail.com address and into my jayallenwrites.com account.

Speeding Things Up

If your old account has a ton of email, importing is slooooow. And by “slow,” I means days. Gmail only sucks in about 200 messages at a time from your old account.  If you’ve used filters to apply labels to emails you receive from high volume mailing lists, I recommend purging them before synchronizing with your old account.

If you’re not using labels and filters, you can delete everything from your account that you don’t want to keep by constructing an advanced search query that excludes all the email you do want.  For example, say that you only want to keep all messages to and from your spouse. Simple – use the following search syntax:

-(from:mysweetbaby27@gmail.com) -(to:mysweetbaby27@gmail.com)

The negative sign tells Gmail to exclude all messages that match the specified search criteria. You can use the same technique for other Gmail search fields, such as subject and cc. Click Select: All on these search results, then click the Select all nnn conversations link, and then click the Delete button. Congratulations – you’ve just purged your life!

Once Gmail finishes syncing your archive, it will periodically check your old account for new mail. This ensures you can still remain in touch with friends and business partners. You can (and should) set a Vacation message in Settings that tells people you’ve shifted. But trust me: there will be people who won’t change your Contacts entry, and will pull up your old address from Gmail’s autocomplete feature. Be safe, not sorry!

Spam Spam Spam Spam…

Be warned that Gmail may mark an inordinate amount of imported mail as spam. In particular, it loves to toss Facebook notifications into the Unsolicited Commercial E-mail bucket. Stay on top of your Spam folder during import, and mark valid messages as Not Spam as they arrive. (If your Spam folder isn’t visible in the Gmail label list, go to Settings->Labels, and click show next to the Spam label.)

Exporting Chats

Unfortunately, neither I nor anyone else has discovered how to bulk-mail your chats to a new account. It’s a good idea to keep your old account around in case you ever need to refer to a past conversation. However, if you only have a few chats you consider keepers, you can email them individually to your new address. View the chat in Gmail, and click the Forward link at the bottom. And yes, you can only do this one chat transcript at a time.