• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Personal / Import your old Outlook/Express PSTs to Gmail

Import your old Outlook/Express PSTs to Gmail

November 26, 2007 By Stephen 12 Comments

Like so many other people, I’ve switched my personal email use over to Gmail. In fact, I did it back in mid-2005, redirecting my personal address on my private fosketts.net domain from Dreamhost’s POP mail service to my gmail account. I’ve been happy with it ever since, but my old mail still sat on my old desktop PC in a PST file created by Microsoft Outlook.

I love that Gmail keeps all of my email online and easily searchable – when I need to locate some old bit of information, I can usually find it by typing a couple of words into the Gmail search box, no matter where I am. Since I travel a lot, I’ll often log into Gmail from my work laptop, a hotel PC, or my iPhone just for this purpose.

But the other day, I remembered a message my dad sent me a few years ago and wanted to look it up. I was stuck, though, because the message was sitting in a PST on my (powered-off) desktop back at home. I was able to get to it from my laptop through a complicated process that involved ssh, my Tomato-powered router, wake-on-LAN, and remote desktop… Not something I wanted to go through again!

I got thinking that I’d love to have all of my mail in Gmail – even those messages from before I started using it. Turns out, lots of people were thinking about this way back when, but it’s always been difficult to import mail into Gmail, and lots of folks think it still is. But I found that, thanks to Gmail’s new IMAP feature, it’s now super easy to get your PST (and Thunderbird, etc) mail into Gmail! Read on for how I did it, and how you can too!

It used to be pretty difficult to get messages into Gmail, and most solutions revolved around re-mailing old messages to your new Gmail account, or having Gmail access a POP server and import messages for you. Neither of these effectively solved the problem of mail stored in Outlook PST files, though. If you had a PST, you needed to extract them into a standard format and (try to) use a Gmail mailer like GML to import them. This may work for you, but it didn’t work for me and I don’t suggest it.

The new (functional) method I used simply uses Outlook to move messages in bulk over an IMAP connection. IMAP lets the Outlook directly access folders on a remote mail server for drag and drop mail operations, and this is the functionality we’re leveraging with Gmail.

Gmail doesn’t have folders, of course, but it spoofs them with labels. So when you access a Gmail account with an IMAP server, your labels show up as folders, and when you drop a message into one of these “folders”, it simply gets that label in Gmail. Note that it does not get an “Inbox” label, however, so you won’t see the message in the Inbox, only when you click on the label or search with the search box. But this works pretty well, and allows you to neatly label old messages as being non-Gmail, which might be helpful.

So let’s say you’re using some version of Outlook (or Outlook Express). Here’s what to do:

  1. Enable IMAP in your Gmail account settings
  2. Configure Outlook to access Gmail per Google’s directions
  3. Once you connect to Gmail’s IMAP, you should see all of your labels show up as folders – this is key!
  4. In your Gmail account, create a new label for your migrated email – I called it “Old Mail”, clever eh?
  5. Now just select all of the messages in each PST folder (control-A is your friend) and drag and drop them on the folder/label you just created
  6. Moving messages takes a while – I let it run while I had dinner and found about 2000 messages moved over when I returned

You have now migrated your email to Gmail! Here are a few gotchas I noticed:

  • As I mentioned above, the messages will not show up in the Inbox, but can be accessed by clicking on the label or through the search box Update: After a few days, my Gmail inbox does now include all of my “Old Mail”, even those without the “Inbox” label.  Weird.
  • Native messages from or to an exchange account also configured in Outlook show up as “Unknown sender” and “No subject” because Gmail can’t figure out their headers. The data is there, and it’s searchable, but not all that readable.
  • Gmail de-duplicates messages rather effectively – drag the same message in 12 times and it only shows up once! This is very cool, but can be frustrating if you trash a message and then try to copy it in again, as I did while trying to figure this all out! If it’s in Gmail’s trash, it will never show up in the desired folder!
  • For some reason, my iPhone (which uses IMAP to connect) immediately downloaded all the old messages I just copied into my Inbox, bumping my real new mail from its list even though it supposedly sorts by date… So suddenly the top unread messages in my iPhone inbox were dated from 2001 and earlier! Pretty funny, really, but not at all as expected. Mail without the Inbox label (dragged to another folder/label) does not exhibit this problem, though.

Good luck with this, and I hope it helps! By the way, a similar process helped me migrate my even-older mail through Thunderbird…

Update: After others have tried this method, they have reported that Gmail is sorting the messages wrong in the main Inbox list – sorting by date of import rather than date of receipt.  I have no such problem, though Gmail did apparently rescan my “Old Mail” messages and add them to my Inbox at some point over the last few days.  So maybe you have to wait a while?  Also, I wanted to note that I did my import using Outlook 2002, so maybe there are weird effects of using other Outlook versions…

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier
  • Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion
  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From…
  • How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12
  • Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!

Filed Under: Personal, Terabyte home Tagged With: Exchange, Gmail, IMAP, iPhone, Outlook, PST, Thunderbird

Primary Sidebar

Technology is the name we give to things that don’t work yet

Danny Hillis

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12

February 3, 2022

Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion

January 24, 2022

How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier

January 14, 2022

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    Top VMware Blogs 2014: How I Voted

    February 25, 2014

    Preserving Your Credibility Is Your Prime Directive

    June 4, 2012

    Virtual Machine Mobility: Of What, and to Where and in What State?

    January 16, 2012

    Download My Free E-Book, “Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts”!

    April 4, 2017

    The Ideal pfSense Platform: Netgate RCC-VE 2440

    September 21, 2015

    vSphere 6: NFS 4.1 Finally Has a Use?

    February 3, 2015

    Infographic: Real-World Port Throughput Relative To Thunderbolt (Formerly Light Peak)

    February 21, 2011

    From LAN Manager and SMB to CIFS: The Evolution of Prehistoric PC Network Protocols

    March 22, 2012

    How Fast Is It? A Storage Infographic

    October 29, 2010

    The I/O Blender Part 1: Ye Olde Storage I/O Path

    May 23, 2012

    Footer

    Legalese

    Copyright © 2022 · Log in