Su Tech Ennui: Transferring mail from one gmail account to another using pop3

Monday, September 17, 2007

Transferring mail from one gmail account to another using pop3

A year or so back when I set up my Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) email account, I already had the best part of a year's mail in an old regular Gmail account and no way to transfer from one to the other.

GMail did allow you to import from external POP3 servers but apparently you couldn't pull mail from another gmail account. I haven't needed to do that since, but if it still behaves like that, here's the fix!

I discovered that if you did a DNS lookup of the Google POP3 server (pop.gmail.com) and entered the raw IP rather than the domain, it worked just fine :-) Whether it was an internal/external DNS view problem, or they actually did it deliberately by blocking the domain, I couldn't say.

I do have some vague recollection that the pop3 server wasn't accessible from the outside world. I guess GAFYD was able to access it because it was also on the inside...

Let's see if I can find my notes on how to do this... ah, here we are...

Username is 'whatever' if your email is 'whatever@gmail.com'. The Pop3 server is 66.249.83.109 (i.e the IP of pop.gmail.com), Port is 995, "Always use SSL" is checked.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if this workaround still works...

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