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Copy your email from UW Google to UW Office 365 mail

Best Practices

Once your email has fully sync’d to Thunderbird, you can begin the process of copying email from your UW Google email to your UW Office 365 email. We recommend the following best practices.

  • Copy email rather than moving email. Copying is more reliable and less prone to possible failure. When copying, your email remains on your UW Google mail account. Once you have successfully completed copying, you should delete the messages from your UW Google account to free up space and avoid duplication.
  • In your UW Office 365 account, make a folder to copy your Google email to. This will make the copy process easier. You can reorganize your email within your account after you have copied all the email you want to transfer.
  • Do not migrate mail folders that are auto-generated when Google applies additional labels to your email. This includes All Mail, Important, and Starred. Emails in these folders should be in other folders you will copy. You also won’t want to copy Spam/Junk and Trash folders.

Create a folder in UW Office 365 email to use as copy destination

In Thunderbird, right-click on your UW Office 365 account in the left-hand column. Select New Folder….

Give the new folder an easily recognizable name, e.g. UW Google Mail. Click Create Folder. The folder will be added to the left-hand folder list for this account.

Create O365 folder for Google Mail transfer step 1

Create O365 folder for Google Mail transfer step 2

Folder created

Copy messages and folders from UW Google mail to UW Office 365 mail

You are finally ready to begin copying email from your existing UW Google mail to your new UW Office 365 mail. Verify that Thunderbird has completed syncing your Google email account. The bottom bar will either contain a message like the one shown here indicating your Google account is up to date, or it will show no message.

Thunderbird status bar

 

There are two different types of folders in Google mail and the method for copying emails from them to UW Office 365 mail is slightly different for each.

  • Standard folders created by Google mail – e.g. Inbox, Drafts, Sent – cannot be copied as a folder; the individual messages within the folder must be selected and copied.
  • Folders (labels) you created within Google mail can be copied directly. Any subfolders within these folders will be copied in the same operation.

 Standard Google folders – copy procedure

We’ll use the Inbox from your UW Google mail as an example of a standard folder. If you right-click on this type of folder, you will notice there is no Copy To command listed. Because you can’t copy the folder as a unit, you will first need to create a sub-folder within the previous folder you created to which you will copy your Inbox messages.

  • In your UW Office 365 account, right-click on the folder you created to receive your copied email and select New Subfolder….
  • Enter a name for the subfolder in the dialog box. To avoid confusion, use a name that is different from the standard folder name. In this example, it has been named Google Inbox. Click Create Folder.
  • Once created you will see the folder in your folder list in the left-hand column of the Thunderbird window.

Create sub-folder in Inbox copy 1

Create sub-folder in Inbox copy 2

Create sub-folder in Inbox copy 3

Select all the messages in the Inbox of your UW Google account

  • Click on your Inbox in the folder list of your UW Google account and then click once on any message in the right-hand pane to select it.
  • Use the Select All command to select all messages in the Inbox folder. Use a keyboard shortcut – Mac: Command-A or Windows: Control-A – or go to the Edit menu and chose Select > All .

At the top of the message pane, you will see the total number of messages in this folder and the total number selected which should be the same number.

Select first message in folder

select all messages in folder

Copy all selected messages in your UW Google account’s Inbox to the subfolder you created in your UW Office 365 account.

  • Right-click on any highlighted message or click the Message menu. Select Copy To > and navigate through the folder list to the Google Inbox subfolder.
  • Click this copy destination folder to begin copying.

Copy to subfolder in O365 email

You will see the progress of the message copy in the bar at the bottom of the Thunderbird window including both a message about copying and a progress bar in the lower-right corner. Depending on the number of messages you are copying, the operation may take a long time to complete.

Repeat this for other standard Google folders such as your Sent and Drafts folders after first creating subfolders to copy the messages into. You can do multiple Copy To operations in succession, but you may find it useful to wait for one copy to complete before continuing to the next one.

 

User-Created Google folders – copy procedure

Copying folders (labels) that you created your UW Google mail is a much simpler process. Each folder and any subfolders within it can be copied in a single command and you don’t have to create any additional subfolders in your UW Office 365 mail.

  • In the UW Google mail folder list on the left pane of Thunderbird, right-click on a folder you wish to copy to UW Office 365 mail.
  • Select Copy To > and navigate within your UW Office 365 folders to the UW Google Mail folder you created. Click that folder to begin copying. If that folder contains any sub-folders, those will be copied as well.

Copy user-created folder to copy destination in O365 mail

  • After the first folder you copy, this copy destination will be listed at the bottom of first Copy To > screen. For each additional folder you copy, you can select that rather than drill down through the full folder list.

Copy user-created folder to recent folder selection in O365 mail

Repeat this procedure for each of the folders you want to copy to your UW Office 365 mail account. Keep track of the folders you have copied so you don’t repeat any (you will get a second copy of the folder if you do that).

You can copy each folder one after another without waiting for the copy to complete. It may however be better to complete one folder copy at a time to make tracking easier and to avoid a long queue of copying to be done. Be patient and letting the copying complete. Ideally you should keep your computer awake (laptop open) and plugged in during the migration. If you do put your computer to sleep, Thunderbird should resume the copy when it wakes up again. However, copying the email in smaller increments that you can see have finished may give a better result.

Return to introduction

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