Migrate your Google Mails from one Workspace account to another Workspace account (For Google Administrators)
Recently, I had to migrate all my emails from my existing gmail account (which is part of a Google Workspace account) to my new gmail account that is in another Google workspace account. Thanks to ‘Google Workspace Help’ page, because all the steps were all well documented. But why I’m writing this blog is because the documents were a bit scattered which means I had to go through multiple links for completing this process. So, I thought it would be helpful for some folks with this same use case, if I consolidate it as a single document.
Prerequisites:
- In order to complete this process, you must be signed in as a ‘Super Administrator’ of your Google Workspace account.
Prepare your Source Account
In this section, we are preparing the source account for the data migration. Source account is the one that you will be migrating data from.
Step 1: Make sure ‘IMAP’ is turned on for the user that we are going to migrate the mails from.
- Sign in to Google Admin Console
- Go to Apps > Google Workspace > GMail > End User Access
- Select the organizational unit you want to configure settings for.
- Under ‘End User Access’ section, make sure POP and IMAP access is enabled
- Under the IMAP section, you can select ‘Any mail client’ for now
- Save the changes.
Step 2: If your source account has 2-step verification enabled, generate an ‘App password’ for the data migration service
Note: This section is only required if your source account is enabled 2-step verification
- Go to your Google Account.
- Select Security
- Under “Signing in to Google,” select App Passwords
- At the bottom, choose Select app and choose ‘Other (Custom name)’ and then provide a name and then click on ‘Generate’
- Save the App password somewhere safe as this password is required for the migration process
- Tap ‘Done’
Step 3: Sign in to GMail (source account) and update settings
- Sign in to GMail account
- Click on ‘Settings’ and select ‘See all settings’
- Click ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’
- Under IMAP access, select Enable IMAP
- Under Folder size limits, select Do not limit the number of messages in an IMAP folder (default)
- Click Save changes
- Again come back to setting page
- Click Labels
- Make sure that any label that needs to be migrated has the Show in IMAP box checked
- Done
Data Migration to the Destination Account
In this section, we will start the migration process. All the steps mentioned here will be done against the target Google Workspace Domain.
Step 1: Setup Migration service
- Sign in to the Google Admin Console
- Go to Data Migration Section
- Click Set Data Migration Up
- For Migration Source, select Google Workspace
- Click Start
- For Migration Start Date, choose a start date for your migration
- For Migration Options, if you want to choose from the option, choose that or accept the default
- Click Select Users
Step 2: Migrate Email of the source account to a new/existing email in the new workspace account
- Click Add user
- For Source Email, enter the user’s Google Workspace email address on the source account
- For Password field, enter the user’s password for their source email account. If the source account has 2-step verification enabled, use the App password that we generated above
- For Google Workspace Email field, start entering the user’s new Google Workspace email address and choose from the list of suggested users.
- Click Start
- You can see the progress of the data migration under the ‘Data Migration’ section in Google Admin console
The process may take several hours for the migration to complete depending on the size of the mails.
