As mentioned in my last post, it is not too easy to migrate from a normal Gmail account to a Google Apps account. Lots of tools do not bring satisfying results. The only tool that brought the best results was imapsync. Being a command-line tool, it is not easy to use for most. Hence, I want to ease the usage by providing this step by step tutorial. It is tailored for Mac OS X users. However, there is a very straightforward guide for Windows as well. In fact, my short tutorial is based on that one :)

Step 1: Download & Installation

  1. Imapsync used to be for free. Unfortunately, the programmer recently decided to charge $45. A little heafty for a (hopefully) one time usage. Luckily, the older versions work just fine and can still be downloaded without charge.
  2. Download the following modules: Mail::IMAPClient Digest::MD5 Term::ReadKey IO::Socket::SSL Date::Manip File::Spec Digest::HMAC_MD5 PAR::Packer
  3. Unpack the modules to /Library/Perl/Updates/5.10.0/. If you don’t know how to get to that folder, press ⇧ + ⌘ + G while being in the Finder and paste the path in the box. Please note, that the packages Mail::IMAPClient and Date::Manip need some more love. You have to move the Mail folder from inside the lib folder of the unpacked package to /Library/Perl/Updates/5.10.0/.
  4. Open Terminal. If the following statement does not produce an error message you have installed the modules successful:\r\n<pre>perl -mMail::IMAPClient -mDigest::MD5 -mTerm::ReadKey -mIO::Socket::SSL -mDate::Manip -mFile::Spec -mDigest::HMAC_MD5 -e ‘’<\/pre>
  5. Download Imapsync; the old version for free or buy the most recent version.
  6. Extract the tar.gz file. You might need to install the Unarchiver to be able to unpack the file.

Step 2: Sync your Email

  1. Open Terminal.
  2. Change your directory to your imapsync folder. Probably you achieve it by typing cd ~/Downloads/imapsync-1.350/ into the command line.
  3. Use the following command to sync (in our case rather, copy) the mail from your Gmail account to your new Google Apps mail account. Of course, adjust the account details to your accounts.
./imapsync ^
--host1 imap.gmail.com --port1 993 --ssl1 --authmech1 LOGIN ^
--user1 user@gmail.com --password1 password4gmail ^
--host2 imap.gmail.com --port1 993 --ssl2 --authmech2 LOGIN ^
--user2 user@yourdomain.com --password2 password4user2 ^
--split1 100 --split2 100 ^
--reconnectretry1 30 --reconnectretry2 30 ^
--noauthmd5 --noreleasecheck ^
--timeout 1200  --allowsizemismatch
  1. The process will probably take quite a while now. Took hours for me.
  2. Set up a forward rule in your Gmail account to your new account. So that all mail gets automatically send to the right place :)

I hope this helps. And I hope that Google will provide a much easier and acceptable solution in the future.