Mariusz Slonina

Have you ever thought about switching to Gmail? The best mail ever? And what about your contact list? And what about your old mails?

I decided to switch do Gmail, not because of huge storage, but simplicity and speed. However, since I didn't want to lose all my old email from three or four accounts (or more, I don't remember) I had to found a solution for exporting them.

Exporting contacts in CSV format and importing them to Gmail is rather simple, hence exporting mails one-by-one by forwarding them to Gmail is not efficient, I tried another approach which is tricky, but simple.

1. Install Thunderbird.
2. Create an account from which you want to export your mails
3. Switch your Gmail account to IMAP
4. Create some labels for your mail, e.g. MyOldMail
5. Create Gmail account in Thunderbird (there is a wizard for this, AFAIK)

Now, the trickiest part -
6. Download your old mail to Thunderbird

And finally - simple Drag'n'Drop your old mail to Gmail MyOldMail folder, which is created automagically when you create some labels.

That's all! Gmail will sync your old mail even with attachments!