Painless Corporate Migration to Gmail/Google Apps Premiere?

March 10, 2009 7:59 AM

We're recommending the migration of a client's web-based email service from Squirrelmail to Gmail (via Google Apps Premiere). What's the most painless way to do this?

Is there a company that provides such a service? I'd prefer not to do the migration myself but will if there's some really great software that can handle it. I've seen Emailchemy, but that's Mac based.

Also - can this migration preserve the staff's existing email archives? (it's not going to go over well if everything has to be forwarded, showing emails as From:UserA/To:UserA, rather than From:OriginalSender)

posted by jacksides to computers & internet (4 comments total)

What's the backing store for Squirrelmail? IMAP or POP?

There are a few ways to do it, depending on how much mail you have, and how many clients.

Try one of these:
* Add your old mail server and your new gmail imap server to your e-mail program, drag the e-mail between the two.
* Setup gmail to fetch the e-mail from your server.
* offlineimap sync to local, then sync to gmail.

See Moving mail from another account to gmail.
posted by devnull at 8:10 AM on March 10

Squirrelmail uses IMAP as a backend. Is the IMAP server publicly reachable? If so, you could set up a mail client that speaks IMAP (such as Thunderbird), connect to both the old server and Gmail via IMAP, and simply drag all the emails and folders over. You'd have to do this for each account, which may be a pain. The easiest way would be something scriptable, such as a command line IMAP copy/sync utility. There are several out there: iicopy, IMAPcopy, and imapsync.
This would preserve the staff's existing email archives. Emails that are in folders will instead be labeled with the old folder names on the Gmail side.
posted by zsazsa at 8:19 AM on March 10

The Google Apps Administration Tools themselves will help you with IMAP import if you're a Premiere customer.
posted by Wild_Eep at 8:56 AM on March 10

Recent related post with my response in there. Sounds like IMAP is the way to go and I like the PDF I referenced in that post - Best Approaches for Large Migrations, which is very detailed.

The built-in IMAP migration tool that Google provides is very, very good. It can be run multiple times without creating duplicates and preserves folders (as labels) and to/from etc. There are companies that will help with this (see here).
posted by idb at 9:06 AM on March 10