I, among others, have searched for a solution to transfer email in my gmail account to my google apps email.  There isn’t a formal way of doing so via Google, but low and behold I stumbled across a way to do it with Linux!  Consider this an addendum to that post, with complete instructions for those not familiar with linux.  I wanted to keep all of the labels, stars, read status, and email date.  As an added bonus, this method allows you to change the recipient value on emails so that it shows that it came from “me” rather than your gmail address.  I used Amazon EC2 to work the magic for me and 46k emails later, I’m a happy google apps user 🙂    You can just as easily use your own linux box alternatively.

This is how you can transfer your email from Gmail to your Google Apps email:

1. Log into Amazon EC2 and select a Fedora instance.  It doesn’t really matter which instance you use.  I used “Basic Fedora Core 8 (AMI ID: ami-5647a33f)”
2. Follow the example video on Amazon’s website for how to SSH into your instance
3. Log in as root
4. Install imapsync by running “yum install imapsync”
5. Edit a script by running “nano run-imapsync”
6. Paste in the following:
   imapsync –host1 imap.gmail.com
   –port1 993 –user1 user@gmail.com
   –passfile1 ./passfile1 –ssl1
   –host2 imap.gmail.com
   –port2 993 –user2 user@domain.com
   –passfile2 ./passfile2 –ssl2
   –syncinternaldates –split1 100 –split2 100
   –authmech1 LOGIN –authmech2 LOGIN
   –justfolders

   imapsync –host1 imap.gmail.com
   –port1 993 –user1 user@gmail.com
   –passfile1 ./passfile1 –ssl1
   –host2 imap.gmail.com
   –port2 993 –user2 user@domain.com
   –passfile2 ./passfile2 –ssl2
   –syncinternaldates –split1 100 –split2 100
   –authmech1 LOGIN –authmech2 LOGIN
   –regexmess ‘s/Delivered-To: user@gmail.com/Delivered-To: user@domain.com/g’
   –regexmess ‘s/<user@gmail.com>/<user@domain.com>/g’
   –regexmess ‘s/Subject:(s*)n/Subject: (no–subject)$1n/g’
   –regexmess ‘s/Subject: ([Rr][Ee]):(s*)n/Subject: $1: (no–subject)$2n/g’

   Replace name@gmail.com with your Gmail address and name@domain.com with your Google Apps email address

7. Press Control-x to save the file and quit nano
8. Make the script executable by running “chmod 744 run-imapsync”
9. Create a file containing your Gmail password by running “nano passfile1”
10. Type in your Gmail password and press Control-x to save the file
11. Create a file containing your Google Apps password by running “nano passfile2”
12. Type in your Google Apps password and press Control-x to save the file
13. Execute the script by typing “./run-imapsync”

Depending on the size of your mailbox, you’ll have nirvana in a few hours 🙂  Transfering my 46k emails weighing in around 2.5Gb took roughly about a day… I had to babysit the process because it failed after a while for some unknown reason.  But restarting it with the specified –maxage param will get you right back near where you left off.  You may notice that I call imapsync twice in my script file.  It was failing on messages that had multiple labels and the folders weren’t created yet.  So the first call creates all of the folders while the second call moves all of the messages.