How to transfer all emails from Gmail to Outlook

Thomas

4 years ago

In this article we will explain how to transfer your entire Gmail mailbox to Outlook even if you have literally thousands of emails in your box. There are two ways to do this. The first one is to setup a separate Outlook account for your Gmail box and import Google Mail data to it manually. The second method is to download your Google account data, then use the automatic email conversion tool – Gmail to Outlook Transfer. Click here to skip directly to the instruction.

What is Gmail and why transferring emails from it can be problematic

Gmail or Google Mail is a web-service and a popular web mail client. More than a billion emails accounts are registered at Gmail, so it is hands down one of them most popular email clients in the world. However, people often need to migrate from Gmail to Outlook. The problem is: giants like Google or Microsoft are skeptical towards each other. This often means that there are no easily accessible ways to convert emails or documents from one service to another. Well, not a problem you may think, there are multiple tools and online services all around offering you to transfer emails from Gmail to Outlook, I’ll just take one of them and – voila!

Unfortunately, seemingly easy migration to Outlook from Gmail using third-party tools typically ends up being unreliable. One of the most common problems during such conversion is missing emails. “Wait-wait-wait! I need ALL of my emails from Gmail to Outlook. There are VITAL!”. Yes, we know. That is why we composed this guide to help you transfer all emails no matter how many of them you have.

But why leave Gmail in the first hand?

The reasons for exporting emails from Google mail service to Outlook vary. We have conducted a small research, and here are the most common reasons for migration named by users:

Inability to use Gmail anymore (due to corporate rules, for example)
Bugs
Too much advertising
Legacy mailbox that wasn’t in use for some period but contains important data
Consolidation of multiple emails under one account
User interface (some people really prefer Outlook over Gmail)
Other Outlook features that Gmail lacks

Surely, the list is incomplete. People might have a whole lot of various reasons to migrate. After all, why not? Who are we to blame them? If you also think it is time to say “so long” to Gmail and migrate to Outlook, this article is for you.

Two ways to transfer emails from Gmail to Outlook

Yes, indeed, there are two ways to do this. Both methods are totally doable, but the first one requires a bit more technical knowledge than the second one. Here we go!

Method 1: Manual transferring of emails from Gmail to an Outlook account

The core idea behind this option is to create a new Outlook account and connect it to your old Gmail box via IMAP. Then, you simply let Outlook retrieve all the emails. Here is a step-by-step:

Open Gmail.com and login to your Google account.
Click the gears icon to bring up the settings panel.
Click the See all settings button to open the Settings window.
Go to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
In the IMAP settings section, select the Enable IMAP setting.
Save changes.

The above sequence will allow other email clients (Outlook in our case) to access Gmail mailbox via IMAP.

Open Outlook.
Go to the File menu and select Add account.
In the account setup window enter the Gmail mailbox data: your name, your Google account username and password you use with this Gmail box.
Complete the remaining steps of the account adding process and click the Finish button.

Now, the Gmail account is synchronized with your Outlook account. All messages from Gmail are now accessible from the Outlook account you’ve just selected. However, these are still Gmail data, although mirrored in Outlook. To transfer all emails from Gmail to Outlook you need a few more steps.

Go to the File menu and select Open and Export, then Import/Export.
We need to export Gmail data to a PST file. To do this, select Export to a File. Click Next.
For the output file format, select Outlook Data File (PST). Click Next.
Select the account you have just synchronized with Gmail.
To make sure all emails from this Gmail account will be exported to a PST file, select folders and subfolders too.
Finally, select the destination path where the resulting PST file should be saved to and finish exporting.

The exporting may take a while depending on how many emails you have in your Gmail mailbox. The resulting PST file can be opened in Outlook on the same or another computer.

The manual method is quite reliable, but still sometimes does not guarantee that ALL of your email correspondence from Gmail will end up in Outlook in a good shape. Corruptions and damages are not rare, unfortunately. Also, manual exporting requires time, and if done incorrectly by an inexperienced person can also lead to errors.

Method 2: Automatic transfer of Gmail messages to Outlook

This method involves downloading our tool, Gmail to Outlook Transfer, then download messages from Gmail as a .zip archive containing multiple MBOX files, and finally import those MBOX files to Outlook. Here is a detailed instruction.

* - The unregistered version converts a limited number of messages

First of all, you need to download your Google Data. Specifically, Gmail messages. To do this, follow these steps:

Login to your Google Account.
Open the Download data page at https://takeout.google.com/
The Google Takeout tool allows you to download all data from your Google account, but we only need emails, so click the Select none button to deselect all services, then select Gmail. Click Next.
Select the “.zip” file type and the maximum archive size. The entire volume of your email messages will be split onto multiple archives of that size.
Select the preferred delivery method: send to email, download, upload to Dropbox, add to Google Drive etc. We recommend just downloading the files, but depending on your migration scenario you may want to select another option, which is perfectly ok.

Once download completes, you will end up with one or more .zip files containing ALL emails from the Gmail mailbox. Now it is time to install Gmail to Outlook Transfer.

* - The unregistered version converts a limited number of messages

Download Gmail to Outlook Transfer here, then install it.
Unpack the downloaded email archives and extract all MBOX files into some local path.
Run the Gmail to Outlook Transfer tool.
On the starting screen, click the browse button … to select the folder where you extracted your MBOX files. Click Scan Folder button. The program will scan the specified folder and will automatically locate any MBOX files. The internal folder structure is preserved after importing.
After the program has successfully scanned all the folders, click the Save PST button to import all emails from Gmail to Outlook PST file, choose the file name and location to save it then confirm saving. This will require Outlook to be installed on this computer. If you want to import emails directly into Outlook, click the Mode menu and select Import to Outlook. This will allow you to import Gmail correspondence directly into default Outlook user profile instead of saving it to Outlook PST file.

Note: Direct import to Outlook profile works only if the mail server supports this or if your Outlook User Profile is configured as POP3 (local profile).

In comparison with the manual method, the automatic one is more flexible. For one, you don’t need Outlook to be installed on the computer. The Gmail to Outlook Transfer tool also fixes common errors and damages in emails, attachments and embedded files. This results in accurate conversion that allows you to almost immediately after transfer from Gmail to receive and send emails using Outlook. No need to spend hours on locating missed messages, fixing messages date and time stamps, etc.

Conclusion

Gmail is a hands down top-notch email service. Millions of people use it everyday and are totally happy with it. However, when it comes to migrating to Outlook for whatever reason, you want to be sure that literally all emails from Gmail were transferred to Outlook reliably and safely. You can either put your time and effort into manual conversion or use an automatic tool as we described in this article.