Gmail – Importing email into Gmail from Zimbra exported file

gmailimport

I've managed to rip myself away from Zimbra and get myself some Gmail goodness.

Unfortunately, I'm not quite ready to give up my archive of 5000+ emails from the last few years just yet and would very much like to import them into my Gmail inbox.

Because Gmail has now taken over my old inbox, I can no longer retrieve my old emails directly from it, so I've had to export them. These are dropped into a tar.gz file which contains .eml files and .meta files, and the same folder structure as I require.

Any ideas on how I'd get them into Gmail from this file? I've looked around but it seems that tools that would/could do it are no longer available or supported.

Best Answer

If you can import the EML files into a mail client that support IMAP this will be easy.

It seems that Thunderbird can do this, but I'm not 100% sure. (Don't have a local copy to play with.)

Anyway, set-up Thunderbird to be an IMAP client for Gmail. (Lifehacker has an excellent guide to do this.)

Then, import your EML files into Thunderbird.

If necessary, move them to a temporary folder (called "Zimbra" perhaps) which will be a label in Gmail. Then just wait for IMAP to sync them all to the cloud.

After that you can delete Thunderbird, keep it around to make local archives of your e-mail, or keep using it as your main client.

I was able to do this a couple of years ago with thousands of messages from my Pegasus Mail client. (There was some pain in converting to a format that Thunderbird could read, but getting the messages into Gmail was the easy part.)

Related Solutions

Gmail not grouping messages with the same subject from Google Groups

As a bit of a spoiler, we tested this last night. I have two email address (which I will call for the sake of example "test1@gmail.com" and "test2@gmail.com"), and then we did this:

To:      Rebecca <Recip@gmail.com>
From:    My Name <test1@gmail.com>
Subject: this is a test
Body:  blah blah whatever

and additionally

To:      Rebecca <Recip@gmail.com>
From:    My Name <test1@gmail.com>
Subject: this is a test
Body:  this should nest under the other

and voila, they nested. No work required. And then we did this:

To:      Rebecca <Recip@gmail.com>
From:    My Name <test2@gmail.com>
Subject: this is a test
Body:  does this nest with the others?

And it didn't nest!

So in other words, two emails from the same sender with the same subject will nest. Two emails from two different addresses with the same subject will not nest.

IFTTT Gmail to Dropbox – Does It Work If Email Is Archived Manually?

Having done tests on four possible cases, these are the results:

Left in inbox unopened - picked up by the trigger
Left in inbox opened - picked up
Archived unopened - not picked up
Archived opened - not picked up

So the relevant factor is whether the email is still in the inbox. You can take a look at it, but not archive it otherwise it won't be picked up next time IFTTT checks for new emails.

Edit

I should probably add that on contacting IFTTT support, the answer I received doesn't agree with the results of my testing.

"Your Gmail Recipes will fire every time a new email arrives in your inbox that matches the Recipes you've set up."

That's not strictly true as we can see, so it's worth testing these things out for yourself.

The trigger check also runs only approximately every 15 minutes, so if you have something time sensitive this can't be relied upon.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Gmail not grouping messages with the same subject from Google Groups

IFTTT Gmail to Dropbox – Does It Work If Email Is Archived Manually?

Edit

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