So this day has finally come. Now you’ve got to move to Outlook from Gmail. So long, Gmail, and thanks for all the fish, you were a good friend after all. But what if you need to move multiple Gmail accounts to Outlook? In this article we explain how you can transfer email data from several Gmail mailboxes into one Outlook profile.
Using multiple Gmail accounts in Outlook is problematic
In Outlook, you cannot connect to two or more IMAP servers simultaneously. This is a fundamental limitation, so even if you find a workaround to connect multiple Gmail accounts to Outlook, you are still forced to use them alternatively.
That is why we recommend another approach instead. At first, you merge your Gmail accounts together into one big mailbox. Then, you export data from this Gmail mailbox to Outlook. Here is how you can do this.
Converting multiple Gmail accounts to Outlook
Step 1: Merge Gmail accounts
First, we need to merge multiple accounts together. Let’s start with two mailboxes. We will need to import old mail data from one Gmail account to another.
- Login to your first Gmail account and click the “Settings” button in the upper left corner.
- Then, click “See all settings”.
- In the settings window, open the “Accounts and Import” tab.
- Locate the “Import mail and contacts” section and click “Import mail and contacts”.
- Enter the second email address you would like to import data from to this one.
- Now you will need to sign in to your other account and follow the steps of the importing Wizard.
- Select the type of data to import.
- The importing process goes in the background and may take a few hours or even days depending on the amount of mail in the mailbox.
Step 2: Export emails from Gmail to MBOX
To export emails from Gmail, we recommend using the Google Takeout official tool. Google Takeout allows you to export any data from your Google account and download it as a separate file or files.
Here is how to use Google Takeout to export emails from Gmail to the MBOX format. We will use the MBOX format to finally import data from Gmail to Outlook.
- Open Google Takeouts.
- In the “Select data to include” section, click “Deselect all”.
- Scroll down the list of Google services to find Mail in the list. Select it.
- Click the “All Mail data included”. Here you can either choose to export all mail data, or export only specific labels.
- Scroll down and click “Next”.
- In the second section, choose file type, frequency and destination of export.
You can choose to download the converted MBOX files, or tell Google Takeout to upload the exported files to Google Drive or Dropbox. Since we will be importing MBOX to Outlook later, select “Send download link via email”.
- Click the “Create export” button. Google Takeouts will start exporting data. The export progress is displayed on the screen.
- Once the exporting finishes, you will receive a message to your mailbox with the download link. Use this link to download exported MBOX data.
Step 3: Import Gmail MBOX files to Outlook
When Google Takeout finishes, your emails are ready to feed to Outlook. While there are several ways to do this, we recommend importing Gmail to Outlook using the Gmail to Outlook Transfer tool.
* - The unregistered version converts a limited number of messages- Download the Gmail to Outlook Transfer tool here.
- Run the tool. The main window looks like this:
- Click the browse button (the one with three dots) and select the folder where you saved MBOX files exported earlier with Google Takeout.
- Click the “Scan Folder” or “Find Storages” button. The program will scan the provided folder and locate all mailbox files in it.
- After the program finishes scanning, select MBOX files to import to Outlook and click the “Import” button. Also, Gmail to Outlook Transfer allows you to import mail data to a standalone PST file. Use the Mode menu to switch between Save to PST and Import modes. In this case, the “Import” button changes to “Save to PST”.
- Now, the application will convert the MBOX files to Outlook. It may take some time depending on the overall amount of data exported from your Gmail accounts.
You can find the detailed guide on how to export Gmail to Outlook here.
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