Migrating email from one Google Apps account to another isn't easy... well actually it is.... but after spending quite some time looking for the best answer I thought I'd write a super quick blog post about it.
I was confused when I saw mention of the Microsoft Exchange migration tool and skipped past it - WRONG, but I'll come back to that.
I decided to use POP3 connections to pull the email from the ex-user on my Google Apps domain across to the master account where we would archive that former employees email. It worked great until of course (doh!) I realised that the "sent mail" would not be transferred, and it is actually really important, for us to know what exactly was sent to a client or their web designer and exactly when so back to the drawing board.
Life Hacker, usually a great resource, wrote up about using IMAP in April 2010. This looked like a pain and the component they mention isn't available in Gmail Labs any more so back to the drawing board again. I gave up on that pretty fast.
After some more Google-ing I ended up on the Google Support website and I was pleasantly surprised to find a specific article about migrating from one Google Apps account to another.
http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2586165
Again I was a bit put off by the mention of Microsoft Exchange (irrelevant) and also a bit concerned about the need for setting up the API credentials for the entire domain etc.... not for the faint hearted I guess. But I persisted on the assumption that it would work within a single Google Apps Domain.
Hey presto, well not hey presto.... but it is working through the mass of emails... it'll take hours yet but I can see the email I want migrating, inbox, sent-mail and all the other labels, as they're showing up in the destination (archive) account.
I am very happy with that
Do you have Google Apps?
Do you manage it yourself?
When an employee leaves what do you do with their email?
BTW - If you're interested in getting help with Google Apps, we help our clients with it, get in touch with us for a chat on how we can help.
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