Transfer email handling to GMail?

[baldtechnologist]

Howdy, I'm seriously contemplating the use of GMail to host e-mail for some of my domains, while keeping my Web hosting here on Jag. There are a few key wins it would provide, not the least of which is easing some of my support duties and providing a familiar interface for the friends and family I've set up over the years. Given the amount of open threads I see when I run 'ps' on the box, I think it'll reduce quite a few connections on JAg's side of things as well.

So, all that leads up to my question - has anyone here transferred multiple accounts, with years worth of mail to GMail? If so, would you mind sharing your experience, tips, steps and pitfalls?

Most people currently use IMAP, keeping their mail on the server, so I need to ensure they don't lose access to their archives.

Thanks!

[Frank Broughton]

I have one account this way, did it on a new account. Works great. Did not have a ton of data obviously, so I can not help you there.

[the_ancient]

I have not done it for over a year so google may have changed some things however the last time I did it, it took awhile to transfer the emails using standard copy from the old IMAP to the Gmail servers. Gmail would close the connection and for a reset I would assume due to it looking for Abuse Connections.

Gmail has a "Mail Fetcher" that works on POP but that will not move IMAP Folders and put all of the mail in to the standard inbox, so that is more or less worthless IMO.

I am getting ready to move a client from Email hosted on the Web Server to Email @ Google Apps so I will let you know how it goes this time.

[baldtechnologist]

Thanks the_ancient. I'd love to hear a follow-up once you've gone through the process again. I'm trying to determine how long it would take to move everything and the general disruption it would cause to those whose accounts will move. I'm not sure how many of them use POP over IMAP, but I'm sure it's mixed. I expect I'll be in for a fun time.

[jason]

A couple years ago we switched to Goole for handling student email at work. Faculty and staff still have accounts on our locally-hosted Exchange servers. Everyone has an address of @ourschool.edu. Students were given a window of about six months to migrate their manually mail to gmail, after which we (collective "we," I had no part of it) did a mass migration of all of the student accounts that had not converted.

The way our system is set up, the student addresses @ourschool.edu are implemented as aliases in Active Directory that forward to @g.ourschool.edu. This way all students still appear in the Global Address List and they got to keep their existing email addresses. Student mail simply passes through our gateway servers and transparently forwards to Google. I'm not sure how it works on the gmail side, but I think we had the option to configure it so that the from address for students is @ourschool.edu as well.

I've never used Google Apps for domains, so I'm not sure of the options, but you might want to consider implementing a similar setup for your system as well. That way you can migrate users at your and their convenience and, if you find you need a local mail account on the server for some reason, you'll still have that option.

Just my two cents.

--Jason

[TWheeler]

Recently converted some mail accounts. The accounts were copied over easily using the Google tools. One account had over 170mb of data. Took about 30 minutes. Hope that helps on the data questions.

Like Jason, we have a need to forward some messages to Gmail but handle others at the local server. However, achieving this has become a problem.

The Google solution is to create a round trip for the message. So, the MX records for the domain example.com are set to forward to GMail. In Google Apps, there is a setting to redirect messages to unknown accounts to an alias for the domain (let's call it example.net). The MX record for example.net points to the example.com server.

A roundabout solution, but one I could live with if it worked. Doesn't so far. Help ticket posted to JaguarPC but that has been unassigned for almost 24 hours now.

Sorry for the rambling message. Wanted to share experiences so far and see if any other thoughts on the MX relay issues.