Forums/Tips & Tricks

Using Mail Fetcher in Google Apps to migrate email when staff leave

Nick Cobley
posted this on November 07, 2011 10:48

This article is based on the original article published by Google. We have provided it for the purposes of migrating Staff email when they leave, but it actually has many more purposes than that. It can be used as a permanent means of downloading email from addresses outside your Google Apps installation.

For example if you have another account that receives email that you would like to arrive directly in Google Apps, all you need is the POP or IMAP login details to have Google Apps automatically download the email for you.

If you wish to do this, we recommend you read the full article here https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=21289

Introduction

This article will detail the steps involved to setup Google Mail Fetcher to download email from another account within your domain.

This process will download all the email from the source account and place it under a single label in the target account.

IMPORTANT: Any labels used to organise email in the source account will not be imported using this process. If you require the labels to be preserved when importing the account you will need to open a ticket for us to perform the migration, supplying the username and password for both accounts. The process will generally take around 1 working day, or maybe a little longer if there are large amounts of mail to import.

Step 1. Enable POP Access on account your importing

You need to perform these steps on the account containing the email you wish to import. 

To enable POP3 in Gmail:

    1. Sign in to Gmail on the account you want to import. If you don't no the password of the account your importing, ask your local administrator to reset the password for you.
    2. Click the gear icon Gear_Icon.png in the upper-right and select Mail settings at the top of any Gmail page.
    3. Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP.

Forwarding_and_POP-IMAP.png

 

  1. Select Enable POP for all mail. It's important you select the option containing all mail to ensure you receive all the email contained in this account.
  2. Choose what to do with your messages after your POP client or device receives them.
  3. You can ignore step 3 "configure your email client" we will do this manually in the next step.
  4. Click Save Changes button, once saved you should then Logout of this account.

Step 2. Importing the email

IMPORTANT: For this step to work correctly, POP access must be enabled in the account your importing. If you have any problems, login to the source account again, and just check that in the Forwarding and POP/IMAP screen that under item 1 is says Status: POP is enabled.

To set up Mail Fetcher:

    1. Click the gear icon Gear Icon.png at the top of any Gmail page, choose Mail settings and open the Accounts tab.
    2. In the Check mail using POP3 section, click Add POP3 email account.
    3. Enter the full email address of the account you'd like to access, then click Next Step.
    4. Gmail will populate sample settings, but these will be incorrect, you will need to change them to the following:
      Username: full email address of account your importing, so someone@yourdomain.com
      Password: The password of the account  your importing.
      POP Server: pop.gmail.com
      Port: 995
      [  ] Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server
      [x] Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail 
      [x] Label incoming messages (Scroll to the bottom of the labels and select the new label option, create a new label to store these messages under)
      [x] Archive incoming messages (Skip the Inbox) 
    5. Take a second to verify the settings you have entered above, ensuring usernames and passwords are correct (passwords are case sensitive). The window should look similar to this:
      Add_an_account_you_own.png 
    6. Once your happy with the settings, just click Add account. If the settings are all correct, the window will close and the email import process will begin. The import process does take time, even a few days in some cases. As long as you selected tje Archive incoming messages option, email will not arrive in your inbox and instead will show up in the new Label you created.
You can check on the status of the import in the Accounts tab, you should see the account you added under Check mail using POP3. Normally you will see a status like Checking mail... while the import is in progress. This can take a day or two to download all mail so don't be concerned if the message is there for sometime. Generally it will import the oldest emails first. Emails are imported in stages, so you may see a status like "Last checked: 2 minutes ago.200 mails fetched.View history  189 mails remaining." .
This importer will continue to check for email indefinitely. Once your happy it's imported all the mail you can click delete to remove the importer. If your not removing the old account from the system just yet, you can leave it in place as it will continue to download any new email that arrives. If you intend to do this, it's best to Edit the importer using the Edit Info link, then uncheck the Archive incoming messages checkbox. This will mean any new mail will be tagged with the same label but will be delivered to your Inbox as new mail so you can still address new email as it comes in.