Migrating email from one Google Apps account to another

Migrating email from one Google Apps account to another isn't easy... well actually it is.... but after spending quite some time looking for the best answer I thought I'd write a super quick blog post about it.

I was confused when I saw mention of the Microsoft Exchange migration tool and skipped past it - WRONG, but I'll come back to that.

I decided to use POP3 connections to pull the email from the ex-user on my Google Apps domain across to the master account where we would archive that former employees email. It worked great until of course (doh!) I realised that the "sent mail" would not be transferred, and it is actually really important, for us to know what exactly was sent to a client or their web designer and exactly when so back to the drawing board.

Life Hacker, usually a great resource, wrote up about using IMAP in April 2010. This looked like a pain and the component they mention isn't available in Gmail Labs any more so back to the drawing board again. I gave up on that pretty fast.

After some more Google-ing I ended up on the Google Support website and I was pleasantly surprised to find a specific article about migrating from one Google Apps account to another.

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2586165

Again I was a bit put off by the mention of Microsoft Exchange (irrelevant) and also a bit concerned about the need for setting up the API credentials for the entire domain etc.... not for the faint hearted I guess. But I persisted on the assumption that it would work within a single Google Apps Domain.

The Result

Hey presto, well not hey presto.... but it is working through the mass of emails... it'll take hours yet but I can see the email I want migrating, inbox, sent-mail and all the other labels, as they're showing up in the destination (archive) account.

I am very happy with that

Do you have Google Apps?
Do you manage it yourself?
When an employee leaves what do you do with their email?

BTW - If you're interested in getting help with Google Apps, we help our clients with it, get in touch with us for a chat on how we can help.