How to transfer specific e-mails between Gmail account and Google Apps

Question

I have two Gmail(ish) accounts:

• One Google Apps account for work
• One Gmail account for everything else

I like this separation and I like to keep things organized, but some coworkers (often but not always) send work stuff to the personal account and personal(ish) stuff to the work account.

Is there a way for me to select some e-mails in one account and move them to the other?

I use Google's multiple accounts feature and I'm always logged in to both accounts at the same time so I think Google "knows" they're coupled. When I look online I can only find ways to migrate all the e-mails from one account to another one. That is not what I want. I just want to move a select few (I guess I can make a label for them if that helps).

Answer 1

For individual messages, you will need an IMAP capable email client and connect it to both (or more) accounts. I can only speak about Thunderbird, but the same principles apply to other tools as well.

Basically, either copy or move the message from one account to another.

Beware, however, of folders! GMail has no such thing as folders, but only tags. Thunderbird translates this into folders. One GMail message with two tags corresponds to two (identical) messages in Thunderbird, in different folders.

If you move a message out of a folder, Thunderbird essentially tells GMail to remove the label from the message, which is NOT the same a removing it entirely. You may not care about residue in your 'All Mail' archive, but if you do, I found only one way to get it done:

1. Copy messages (rather than moving) from one account to another.
2. Move the messages to a 'delete me' folder or something equivalent.
3. In the web interface of GMail, select all messages in your 'delete me' folder and trash them. In this interface, that actually means removing them. In any connected IMAP clients, the effect will be the disappearance of messages from any folders they were present in, corresponding to any tags they had.

NB: I never tested what happens if TB implements a move (as it does) as a subsequent 'copy' and 'move to Trash'. In GMail, messages live in the Trash for 30 days. What happens 30 days after a simple move from a folder in one account to another account, I don't know.

Another option is to 'bounce' messages. This fits the use case where you receive e-mail in one account, but should really have received it elsewhere and plain forwarding undesirably changes the message headers (sender, receiver, reply-to, dates, reply-to, etc). See this question for more details.

Answer 2

I have this same situation with my email and use Gmail filters to clean it up. Go to Settings > Filters and create filters to forward the proper emails to their destination. The emails will show as being addressed to the original email and since it happens immediately the time stamp is the same.

Not sure the easiest way to transfer the old emails, but filters will be great for any future incoming messages.

Answer 3

The Data Liberation Front points to POP and IMAP as the way to do it.

It looks like you'll need to get yourself an IMAP-capable email client. (Thunderbird is really easy to set up with Gmail.)

What you'll want to do is set up both email accounts with IMAP. Then it's simply a matter of dragging the messages you want to transfer from one account's message store to the other. (That's basically what I did when I moved away from whatever email provider I was using to go full time to Gmail, back in the dim and distant past.)

This seems like overkill for a handful of messages, but Gmail doesn't have a utility to import/export email messages.

For the future, of course, you can set up filters to auto-forward the messages to the right account. Setting up the two mail accounts to "send as" the other would be helpful, too.

Answer 4

You can also try any client like Beyond Inbox to Transfer selective emails between two account. for more details : How to Copy and Move Emails in Gmail accounts?