Migrating Email, Contacts, and Calendar from Exchange/Outlook to Gmail/Thunderbird
For the past few years my wife and I have had our email accounts on Microsoft Exchange. We’ve used 1and1 to host our Exchange accounts, and aside from a couple outages, they’ve served us well. But it costs us $160/year, and it’s hard to continue justifying that bill when Gmail can handle our needs for free. Plus, I’ve been using Gmail for Max Foundry for almost a year (with Thunderbird) and it’s been great. So the time came a few days ago to bite the bullet and migrate everything we have over to Gmail.
I was expecting some pain as part of the migration process, but it never really happened. I give a lot of credit to Google for making this a fairly smooth transition. That’s how they want it, of course, but to pull it off is something else entirely.
This is a behemoth of a post, so feel free to skim and bookmark for later. And before we get started, I’m assuming you’ve already done the following:
- Created your Google Apps account
- Created your user account within your Google Apps account
- Went through the site verification process
- Updated your DNS entries with the Gmail MX records
You *could* wait to make the changes to your DNS settings after the migration process. I’ve actually done it both before and after with the same results.
Also, this post is for those who have historically used Microsoft Outlook to manage all of their email, contacts, and calendars. I’ll show you how to get off Outlook and into Thunderbird for everything.
Enable Google Sync
First things first. Let’s turn on Google Sync so that Thunderbird and your phone can properly sync up with your Gmail account.
1. Login to Google Apps with your administrator account.
2. Go to the Settings tab and then click Mobile on the left.
3. Check the Enable Google Sync box and save.
Migrate Your Data
IMPORTANT: Assuming you currently use Outlook, make sure it has the latest data (emails, contacts, and calendar entries) and then shut it down. This will be your last known good stopping point in case something goes wrong and you need to go back to it.
ALSO: Importing all of your data could take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. It just depends on how much data you have. For reference, my wife had over 10,000 emails to import and I had over 13,000. It took a few hours to import *each account*.
1. Download and install the Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook tool.
2. When it’s done installing, you’ll see the window below. Enter your Gmail address and password and click Continue.
3. Next you’ll be asked which Outlook profile to import data from. You can import data directly from an Exchange profile, Outlook itself, or you can export your data first into a PST file and then do the import from there.
NOTE: If your DNS entries have already propagated with the Gmail MX records, you might not be able to import from your Exchange profile. In that case, importing from Outlook or a PST will do.
You also have a decision to make on how much data to import: all of it or only new data. Choose Migrate all data if this is your initial migration. The Migrate only new data option is for resuming a migration that didn’t fully complete or importing data that arrived after your first migration.
4. Next you have options for which data you want to import, as well as the option for setting a timeframe from which to import the selected data. After you’ve made your selections click Migrate.
5. If you’re importing from an Exchange profile, you might get prompted for your Exchange account credentials. Otherwise, you’ll see a progress window like the one below.
For those who enjoy some light reading, you can click the log file link to see everything that happened during the migration. My wife had 8 failed emails and I had 6. I figured 14 failures out of 23,000 was pretty good.
Now that the data migration itself is complete, let’s move on to Thunderbird.
Setup Thunderbird with Your Email
1. Download and install Thunderbird.
2. Opening Thunderbird for the first time will start a wizard to setup your email. The first screen you’ll see is for you to enter your email account info.
3. When you click Continue, Thunderbird will do some searching to see if it can find where your email account is located, and because your email is now in Gmail, it should find it pretty quick and show the window below. Make sure IMAP (remote folders) is selected and click Create Account.
4. Next you’ll be prompted for a couple system integration options, such as newsgroups and Windows Search. Make your selections and click OK.
5. That’s it. Thunderbird will open and you’ll see it start pulling in all of your emails that you migrated to your new Gmail account. Be aware that it will take Thunderbird awhile to pull everything in from Gmail. Just let it do its thing.
Add Your Contacts to Thunderbird
1. From the Thunderbird menu, go to Tools > Add-ons > Get Add-ons, then search for “google contacts”. You should see Google Contacts 0.6.36 in the list. Install it and restart Thunderbird.
2. After the restart you’ll see an Address Book button in your Thunderbird toolbar.
3. Click the Address Book button to see all of your contacts that were migrated over.
Add Your Calendar to Thunderbird
Setting up your calendar in Thunderbird requires a bit more work and two add-ons, Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar (which enables bi-directional communication between Thunderbird and Gmail).
1. From the Thunderbird menu, go to Tools > Add-ons > Get Add-ons, then search for “calendar”.
2. Look for Provider for Google Calendar 0.8 and install it first. Then find Lightning 1.0b5 and install it. Restart Thunderbird.
3. After the restart, if you go to Tools > Options you’ll notice a Lightning section. You’ll also see a new menu item named Events and Tasks.
4. Click Events and Tasks from the menu and select Calendar; a new Thunderbird tab opens with your calendar entries. Except there won’t be anything in it.
5. To pull in your calendar entries, login to your Gmail account and go to your calendar. On the left side will be the mini-calendar for the current month, and below that will be a heading titled My calendars. Click the Settings link under My calendars.
6. On the Calendars tab, look for your calendar under My Calendars and click its link.
7. This will be the Calendar Details tab. At the bottom of this page is your Calendar Address, with XML, ICAL, and HTML icons.
8. Click the XML icon so that you see a popup window as shown below. Copy the link address shown in the window. We need to give Thunderbird that link (basically, Thunderbird is going to subscribe to your calendar feed).
9. Go back to Thunderbird and bring up your calendar. On the left side, under Calendar, right-click and select New Calendar. In the window below, select On the Network and click Next.
10. Next, select Google Calendar as the format and paste your calendar link from the popup above into the Location box. Then click Next.
11. You should get prompted for your Gmail credentials. Enter them and click OK.
12. Now you’ll see a window where you can name your calendar. Give it a name and click Next.
13. Next is a confirmation box that your calendar has been created.
14. Click Finish and Thunderbird will start pulling in all of your calendar entries.
Get Calendar Notifications on Your Phone
To enable mobile notifications of events, go to your calendar settings and click the Mobile Setup tab. Enter your phone number and click the Send Verification Code button, which will send a text message to your phone with a code. Enter that code in the Verification code box, click Finish Setup, then Save.
Add Your New Gmail Account to Your iPhone
To access and sync your new Gmail account from your iPhone, follow these instructions. It’s pretty straightforward, the only thing of note is that you choose to setup a Microsoft Exchange account instead of a Gmail account. This is because iOS uses Microsoft ActiveSync to manage the bi-directional communication between your iPhone and your Gmail account.
Wrapping Up
So there you have it. A mammoth, yet hopefully extremely helpful, walkthrough for migrating off of Exchange/Outlook and onto Gmail/Thunderbird. It’s been a few days since I migrated both my account and my wife’s account, and there have been no issues to report. Smooth sailing.
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