best way to move from gmail/inbox to fastmail?
 

Hi,

I plan on spending a lot of time in China. I've previously been using a vpn to access my gmail via inbox, and it's worked ok, but they're trying to stop people using vpns, so I am trying to move (back) to fastmail.

NB, when using 'inbox', I almost never 'delete'd message, and just 'archive'd them.

So far, I did an 'import', and then tidied up a lot of junk; followed by setting up a pop3 retrieval from gmail to fastmail.

It seems to be quite a tedious process. Each day, I see that my inbox is full of junk from many years ago, along with some new stuff. So, I 'process' the new messages (usually just deleting them/etc), and then 'select all' and archive. Once I've done that, I then go into 'folders' and try to 'remove duplicates' from the 'archive', so that it doesn't get too full...I seem to be around 65% full ~10GB.

It does seems to be quite a 'never ending' process....and I'm kind of wondering if I am in some kind of 'loop'.

Is there a better way?

Max.

When I switched from gmail to my new mail provider I used Thunderbird.
In Thunderbird I moved the mails from gmail to the other account.
It takes quite some time but it works ok.

When I have tried in the past to move away from Gmail I found that the number of emails doubled or more when moved to the new providers, including Fastmail. Deduplication failed. My suggestion is to leave all of your old emails in Gmail and just start afresh. Or, if you want access to the old Gmail emails download them all using Thunderbird and keep them somewhere you can access when offline. Still, I found that the number of emails increased significantly. Part of the problem is that Gmail merges together multiple copies of the same email you receive, so they appear as one version of the email but in reality there might be 2 or more copies. This happens when some service sends emails to more than one email address for you, but you have them all forwarded on to Gmail. I think labels in Gmail also seem to increase the numbers. Depending upon how the import works you get a new copy of the email in the Inbox and maybe in one or more folders that match up with the labels. As I wrote, the last time I tried migrating emails away from Gmail the quantity just about doubled.

Thanks for the input. I'll probably try to use Thunderbird to finish the move :)

Going forward, I'm wondering how to get my gmail into fastmail.

I had set up a pop3 retrieval, but it doesn't seem completely reliable (I get sporadic messages informing me of failures), and anyway it doesn't seem to pick up all messages (I see a lot of messages in gmail that don't seem to be picked up in fastmail).

I'm thinking I might try to have gmail forward copied to fastmail instead of having fastmail pull them from gmail.

So, what do others do in this situation?

Like I said.
Install Thunderbird, or another mail client and move your mails from Gmail to Fastmail in your mail client.
Have done it a couple of times when switching mail providers, never lost a single mail

You misunderstand. I'm now not talking about migration, which is a one time thing. I'm now talking about ongoing, for new messages sent to Gmail. When I go to China, Thunderbird isn't going to work for Gmail at all, and it doesn't work on mobile anyway, even outside China. I had expected that pulling the messages using POP3 would work, but it doesn't seem to, so I'm now considering pushing them from Gmail to Fastmail using the forwarding feature, I guess.

I'd suggest forward from gmail rather than pop from Fastmail. With pop Fastmail has to keep track of what emails it has pulled over and if that table is not updated properly you may get duplicates etc.

Ok. I'll see how that goes :)

I have found Gmail and Outlook.com forwarding to be reliable, though some people seem to think that traditional forwarding is broken due to everyone tightening the screws on things like DMARC. I would test it out and watch it carefully at first until you know it is bringing over all your email, and periodically spot check the old email Inbox (keep a copy in Gmail).

This is excellent advice, and what I also would recommend. Please also check your spam folder on Gmail, as Gmail does not forward messages it categorizes as spam.

I have found that forwarding is only "broken" because of DMARC, for certain pairs of hosts. Fox example, if you attempt to forward from outlook.com (or hotmail etc.) to Gmail, some messages will be refused by Gmail (it's actually outlook.com's fault, as it does not preserve DKIM at present). But forwarding the opposite direction should work well, as Gmail does not break DKIM.

Forwarding from Gmail to Fastmail should always work properly, except in any cases where Gmail misidentifies an email as spam ("false positive"). But check your Fastmail spam folder from time to time as well as Gmail's. And do not set your Fastmail spam settings to discard email at any level of spam score. Fastmail is a "universal receiver" (kind of like someone with AB positive blood type, a "universal recipient") in the sense that it won't drop email because of a DMARC failure, though that might raise the spam score to the point where your discard rule will do so.

If you go through the "send as" process with Gmail it makes email forwarding to another address even more reliable. Gmail describes what to do here.

OK, nice. I switched off the pop3 fetch on fastmail, and configured gmail to forward instead...seems to be working, even though I only did it a short moment ago.