Needed to change my GMAIL account from an gmail.com to a new domain, associated with Google Apps, moving most elements was easy. Â But the the actual emails proved to be tricky, mostly as there are about 5 years worth of emails and one reason to use GMAIL is the search speed.
There are many ways it seems to move the email you can
- get new gmail to pick up the email from old gmail account, google recommended they call it MailFetcher. Â Bit slow, label issues and sometimes generates errors which although Google acknowledge the error is still there years later. Â Great for a small number of emails up to 10k
- setup IMAP and use a client like Outlook or Thunderbird to download and transfer the emails, bit tedious relies on your own internet connections etc… label issues.
- paid for solutions exist for transferring between email account about 12.00GBP per account. Â Not tried so no comment, but did consider.
- command line driven utils like GMVAULT.
I used GMVAULT in the end, ran it on my machine at home took hours (rubbish internet speed), it works via IMAP to backup your email locally and then restore to the new account, bit like using a mail imap client but once setup much easier and quicker, less label issues.
In the end I used a free AWS instance great internet speed, installed GMVAULT (used Python PiP), copied the previously set up OAuth keys to home directory and set it off, took 40 minutes to backup, about 80 minutes to restore, really quick labels correctly moved then saved the GMVAULT directory to S3 (just incase) and saved the machine image and terminated the instance.
Effective and free love it!