Email: Transferring very large email accounts

Google offers a Transfer tool that works well for most people and most email accounts. However, sometimes that tool fails, and it seems that it may fail if confronted with very large email accounts (e.g. 100GB of storage). In cases like this, you will have to rely on the options below.

Transfer messages and attachments while preserving folders/labels

1) Prepare your Accounts

1. Check how much storage space your Carleton email account takes.
   • If you scroll down to the very bottom of your inbox it'll say "Using" and then a number of MG (Megabytes) or GB (Gigabytes) 
2. Check your storage limit on your Personal account and make sure that there is enough space left to accommodate the amount of email stored in your Carleton account.
3. Purchase additional storage if necessary
4. Turn IMAP on for BOTH of your gmail accounts
5. Install the Thunderbird email application

2) Connect Thunderbird to both of your gmail accounts

IMPORTANT: Pay attention to the options when you connect each account so that you only download the most recent messages from your very large account. Otherwise you may end up using up all the storage space on your computer, which can result in an unusable computer.

1. In the Thunderbird application, go to the File menu and select New > Existing Mail Account
2. Enter your name, full email address, and password, and click Continue
3. Keep the default IMAP option (don't switch to POP3) and click Done
4. A new window will pop up so that you can fully log into your account and allow access for Thunderbird
5. When you get to the screen in Thunderbird that says that your account has been successfully created, click on Account Settings
6. Click on Synchronization & Storage
7. Under Disk Space, select the option to synchronize the most recent 30 days (you can probably increase this to 90 days, but this setting will save your computer from being overwhelmed by email messages)
8. Repeat these steps for your other gmail account

3) Transfer messages folder by folder

This is the very manual part. You will have to repeat this process for each folder/label from your Carleton account.

1. In Thunderbird, right click on the gmail address of your destination account and select New Folder
2. Create a new folder with the same name as one of the folders in your Carleton email account
3. In your Carleton account within Thunderbird, select the messages from the folder in your Carleton account that you've just recreated in your new account (select up to about 5,000 messages at a time unless you have a lot of attachments, in which case select fewer)
4. Drag the email messages into the new folder in your destination gmail account within Thunderbird
5. Repeat the process of selecting messages from your Carleton account and dragging them to the recreated folder in your destination account until you have emptied the Carleton folder into the destination folder
6. Repeat these steps for every folder you want to preserve/recreate in your destination account

4) Transfer remaining messages after folders are moved

Once all the messages in folders have been transferred, you can move on to a more automated method that can also move more messages per day.

• Use the "Manual" method listed here to set up a POP3 transfer from your Carleton account to a destination account. This will move approximately 1250MB per day, or about 38,000 messages per day depending on the number and size of the attachments on your messages.

Transfer messages and attachments only (no labels)

• Use the "Manual" method listed here to set up a POP3 transfer from your Carleton account to a destination account. This will move approximately 1250MB per day, or about 38,000 messages per day depending on the number and size of the attachments on your messages.