Migrating Email to Google Apps

I just helped a friend migrate her email to a Google Apps Hosted account.  While there are a number of ways to migrate your existing email to a Google Apps account I have found that using the unix command line software called larch is the easiest way to do it.

This is for migrating email on a hosted domain so it was a FQDN – fully qualified domain name vs. shifting a user account to a domain.

After reading the larch man pages I came up with the following command line option to sync between a 1-and-1 account and Google Apps Hosted email account.

larch –from imaps://imap.1and1.com –to imaps://imap.gmail.com –all –from-user user@domain.com –from-pass password –to-pass password –to-user user@domain.com

It took about 20 minutes to run and migrate about 4000 email account and sub folders. There were some error messages about Net::IMAP::BadResponseError: Could not parse command (giving up) but I did not really worry about them.  I saw the folders that were having problems and they were from some archived email that she had – so I was not going to worry about them

[Apr 18 15:53:38] [info] 0 message(s) copied, 40 failed, 4242 untouched out of 4282 total

After the migration I logged into my google apps hosted account and made sure that the mail was migrated.  After checking I changed MX records for the Google SMTP servers and the entire migration process was completed.