How do I move email from one account to another?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
askleo.com.
This is one of those situations where people run into it fairly commonly,
and that is they've got an account, it's got a bunch of email in it,
and for one reason or another, they want to move to a new account.
Perhaps they're changing their email
address, perhaps they're just tired of what that old account is.
Maybe they're losing that old account eventually because they're changing ISPs.
Regardless of the reason, they've got a lot of mail in one place,
and what they want to do is preserve it in another.
Now, as it turns out, some email services actually have some a migration tool.
Maybe you can connect up to the old
account from the new account directly and just copy the mail over.
However, that's not really all that common.
It's possible in some email services,
and I honestly recommend that you check yours out if you're in that situation.
But what I'm going to show you is a technique that is honestly not really
all that obvious, fundamentally very simple,
and works with every email account that uses or supports the iMap protocol,
which is pretty much all email accounts these days.
Let's dive in.
What we're looking at is I have here two accounts.
I have my My Outlook.
Com account, which has one email in the inbox.
Of course, I've set this up for example purposes.
It's got my issue number 1001 of the Confident Computing Newsletter.
By the way, newsletter. Askleo.
Com if you want to sign up for that.
It comes out every week.
So this is my Outlook.
Com/hotmail email address, my account.
In the other tab, I have a Gmail account,
and it has issue number and two of my newsletter.
Again, this is my Gmail address, my Gmail account, my Google account.
So I've got two completely separate email
accounts, and what I would like to do is combine the emails into a single account.
Now, in this case, outlook.
Com and or google.
Com may have some of those transfer tools that I talked about.
I'm going to pretend it doesn't because I'm going to use these as stand-ins
for basically any email account that supports iMap.
Now, there is one catch.
Some email accounts, like Google, you have to turn iMap on.
Let me show you how to do that real quick first.
In the Google account,
I'm clicking on the settings gear, see all settings,
and then over here it says forwarding and pop/IMAP.
I want to make sure that IMAP is enabled.
By default, it's not.
So make sure that IMAP is enabled.
If we take a look at the outlook.
Com account, there are settings for pop and IMAP.
It's in the settings, sync, email, pop an iMap.
But you'll notice you can turn pop off, but you cannot apparently turn iMap off.
So IMAP is going to be on for an outlook.
Com account.
Again, this is immaterial if you're not using one
of these two accounts, but as long as IMAP is enabled
for whatever account it is you're using on both sides, then we're good to go.
So what do we do?
Well, I'm going to open a new tab and download Thunderbird.
We're going to do this using a desktop email program.
You can use another email program if you
like, but Thunderbird is the one I'm going to use for my example.
Again, the email program itself needs to be able to use IMAP.
Again, most of them do, and should allow to configure more than
one account at the same time, which again, Thunderbird will do.
I always choose Custom.
Sure, go ahead and do the maintenance It's a 10-inch thing.
I don't want anything on my desktop, but I do want it on my Start folder.
Sure, we'll go ahead and use Thunderbird
as the default email program after we're done.
Launch Thunderbird.
Okay, so we now have a desktop email program on this computer.
Now, we're going to configure it for both the outlook.
Com account and the Gmail account.
We'll start here.
I'm just going to put my name in here, and I'm going to add Gmail since I know it
makes it a little bit more obvious which account I'm dealing with.
The email address is askleotest@gmail.
Com.
We're going to get the password for that. I'll put that right in there.
We remember the password so that
we don't have to enter it again next time we try and get email.
You can see that configuration was found in the Mozilla ISP database.
It knows how to do Gmail.
In fact, it's got IMAP all ready to go.
We'll click on done.
Now, in this case, Google is using an additional layer
of security, an additional layer of authorisation.
This is the email address we're going to use again.
It's probably going to ask for my password again.
Two-step verification.
Okay, I've got a text message I need to respond to.
Thunderbird wants to access my Google account.
Of course, that's exactly what we're asking for it to do.
Account successfully created.
Now, before we go further, let's just have a quick look at what that looks like.
Sure enough, it's got a couple of emails in it.
I've got the message, the 1002 newsletter ready to go as we saw online.
In fact, if we take a look online,
you'll see that we now have three messages here,
the two security alerts associated with this account, and my issue number 1002.
If I go back to Thunderbird, I have the same thing.
That's how iMap works.
It will keep these things in sync.
If I get more email on this account,
it'll show up in both places, online and in Thunderbird.
In fact, one quick thing to look, if I just click on the security alert,
you can see that it's now marked as red here in Thunderbird.
If I go back to Gmail, eventually, that message will also be marked as red.
You can see that the top one is unbolded
now, even though I didn't read it here because it's been read somewhere else.
Great, we've got Thunderbird configured, and this is our askleotest@gmail account.
Let's add another account.
The way to do that, I've clicked in Thunderbird, as it turns out.
If you just type the Alt key once,
you'll get your menu, and we'll go to Account settings.
We will account actions, add a mail account.
This time,
I'm going to use the Hotmail account and go grab its password, paste that in.
Remember the password.
Hit continue.
Thunderbird, again, knows how to talk to outlook.
Com. Again, using IMAP, which is perfect.
We click on done.
It failed.
It failed because I have two-factor
authentication turned onto this account, which means that normal sign in like this
will fail using the password for the account.
I've got an article on that,
but the solution is to very quickly go to the security settings for the account
online and create what's called an app password.
Let's do that real quick.
I'm going over here to my outlook.
Com account, clicking on my Identifier up in the upper
right, and clicking on my Microsoft account.
In the Microsoft account, I will click on Security up here at the top.
Then in Security,
we will click on Advanced Security Options and then scroll down.
You'll see that since I have two-step
verification turned on, I need to create a new app password.
I'll click on that.
There is an app password.
It's basically a unique password
for this specific app that I'm setting up, Thunderbird.
It can be used only here, and it cannot be used for an interactive login.
It only works, so I can't use it if I'm just going to outlook.
Com to sign in.
I can only use it from applications like Thunderbird.
I've copied it to the clipboard.
I will go over to Thunderbird,
paste that in as the password instead, and click on Continue.
Click on Done.
Okay, it failed again.
I cut that out.
The trick that made this work for me is that it wasn't enough to just copy
the password from that screen you saw, I actually had to click the done button
to get that password actually saved by outlook.
Com online.
Now I have my AskLeo example account in Thunderbird.
So in Thunderbird, you can see in Ask Leo
example, I've got an inbox with the one message.
In Thunderbird, you can also see I've got my Gmail account with its three messages.
Now, merging your email is Trivial.
Basically, I'm going to throw everything
into my Gmail account, which means I'll go to my outlook.
Com account, click, and you can see that there's the message.
Drag over to my Gmail account and drop.
It's been removed from my inbox in outlook.
Com.
If you want to copy,
if you want to duplicate things, you would hold down the shift or control
key before you release on the drag and drop.
But in this case, I've simply moved it.
So what does that look like?
Well, over here in Gmail,
I now have both emails because I've moved one from my outlook.
Com account to my Gmail account.
And if we go online and take a look at things, you'll see that here, my outlook.
Com, there's nothing in my inbox because we moved it.
If I go over to Gmail, and sure enough, there are now four messages here.
We now have the message that had sent to my Hotmail account.
In fact, I think you'll even see that it says to askleoexample@hotmail.
Com, even though this is in my Gmail inbox.
Now, what if I want to do the reverse?
Well, it's the same process no matter what you want to do.
I'm going to go back to Thunderbird.
I'm going to shift, select all four of these messages.
I'm going to drag and drop onto my Hotmail
inbox, and I'm going to hold down the CTRL key this time.
So you can see that there's a little plus
next to the arrow that says I'm going to make copies rather than move.
We'll release.
Now, the messages exist in both my Gmail account and my Hotmail account.
And if I go back online, you can see that the Gmail account hasn't changed at all.
But if I go to the outlook.
Com account, back to my inbox, sure enough, there they are.
All four messages have been copied.
That's the way to move messages or copy messages between two accounts.
I've used only the Inbox here.
But if you've got additional folders, as long as they're visible in iMap,
you can copy from any folder in one account to any folder in the other.
You can copy your sent mail, you can copy your junk if you want to,
but you can also copy the emails that you've saved in folders or with labels.
Now, there is one very important thing here that I want to point out,
and that is that it's particularly true when we're using Gmail.
But there is the possibility that there will be some very small data loss.
If the email account you are moving to
doesn't support all of the features that the email account you're moving
from supports, then you're going to lose something.
In this case, honestly,
the only scenario where I know that this happens is the one we've just done.
If you have an email in Gmail that has a label, outlook.
Com doesn't know from labels.
So you will lose the labeling on your
messages when you move them out of Gmail to a non-Gmail account.
The only way around that is to make sure that email labels are visible in iMap,
in which case they will show up as additional folders,
and then you can essentially move those emails into folders of your own choosing.
The only downside there is when you're moving out of Gmail, you'll be duplicating
some, but you will not lose the concept of folders.
You'll just have the email messages show
up both in your AllMail or Archive as well as the folder that you're moving it to.
But the fundamental is very simple.
Configure a third-party desktop email
program like Thunderbird for both accounts using IMAP protocol for both accounts.
And then you can simply drag and drop
email between the two accounts to your heart's content.
I hope that helps.
Or updates for comments for links related to this post and more, visit
askleo.com/167850.
I'm Leo Notenboom. Thanks for watching.