Mail migration - why do people do it?

[Zach]

I've never really understood why people would bother with mail migration when changing their main email accounts. I've changed my mail account several times, for various reasons including too much spam and overall dissatisfaction with the service. Whenever I've made the switch, I've just manually gone through the emails and forwarded important ones over and deleting the rest in bulk. I see no point forwarding everything as most of what's in the account is just clutter, especially if the account has been used regularly for years. Why do people bother with forwarding everything?

[David]

Originally Posted by Zach

I've never really understood why people would bother with mail migration when changing their main email accounts. I've changed my mail account several times, for various reasons including too much spam and overall dissatisfaction with the service. Whenever I've made the switch, I've just manually gone through the emails and forwarded important ones over and deleting the rest in bulk. I see no point forwarding everything as most of what's in the account is just clutter, especially if the account has been used regularly for years. Why do people bother with forwarding everything?

I migrate mail myself: at first it was because I thought I needed to (for business reasons) as I was doing some consulting work (after retirement)

I never really needed it though; most of it was just junk.... going back over twenty years.

You are correct in your synopsis (methinks) Zach

[kijinbear]

If you forward an email, the sender's name will be replaced with your own, and the date/time will be messed up, too. This makes it more difficult to find it later. If an email is worth preserving, it's worth preserving in a form that's easy to find later.

IMAP migration is a piece of cake these days. Services like FastMail can do it automatically if you give them access to your old email account. You don't need to forward anything. The sender's name and date/time will not change at all. You just click a few buttons and all your old emails will magically appear in your new account, exactly as they were in your old account.

So it would cost me much less time and effort to migrate my entire mailbox than to figure out which emails are worth forwarding and then actually forward each of them.

[FredOnline]

Originally Posted by Zach

Whenever I've made the switch, I've just manually gone through the emails and forwarded important ones over and deleting the rest in bulk. I see no point forwarding everything as most of what's in the account is just clutter, especially if the account has been used regularly for years.

Perhaps this says more about your lack of housekeeping skills.

I can't see any point in keeping "clutter" in an account.

If an e-mail isn't worth keeping, I just delete it.

In my FastMail account, I have a "90-Days" folder, where anything that I want to retain for a while is directed. This folder auto-purges anything older than 3 months.

This means that (hopefully!) only the most relevant e-mails are retained.

I have the same set up in my main Gmail account.

The e-mails I want to keep, I don't archive them; they stay in my inbox.

That's worked well for me.

[janusz]

Originally Posted by Zach

Whenever I've made the switch, I've just manually gone through the emails and forwarded important ones over and deleting the rest in bulk. I see no point forwarding everything as most of what's in the account is just clutter, especially if the account has been used regularly for years. Why do people bother with forwarding everything?

Originally Posted by FredOnline

Perhaps this says more about your lack of housekeeping skills.

In my case, laziness comes into play (admittedly " lack of housekeeping skills" sounds much better ). It's simpler to move everything, than to go through the clutter and decide for each message whether to kill or keep. Storage is cheap, the migration process is trivial and there always is a chance you will at some time need a message sent/received three years ago.