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My mother-in-law has been using Outlook for 10+ years and is having all kinds of issues with a very large .pst file. She currently uses it with POP based email provider only (she is an individual and no Exchange server is in the mix). Her .pst is over 7GB.

Once we can get her email archive into the Google cloud, she would stop using her POP provider and exclusively use Gmail. She already has a Gmail account (not apps).

It is important for her to preserve her folder structure as well as her attachments.

Outlook 2007 is painful to use with IMAP, so would prefer to not use that option if we don't have to.

I've googled this and most of what I've seen is very old and not current.

What is the best way to do this?

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4 Answers 4

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I was able to successfully migrate the data using a commercial product called Transend. What I learned during the process is that Google throttles this type of transfer and for a large upload, one will eventually stop being able to remain connected to Gmail. It will simply timeout and disconnect. The trick here is to do this in batches... do a bunch of folders (this is selectable in Transend), then wait 24+ hrs and do some more. I was able to upload 90 folders containing 73,000+ emails over 3 days doing it this way.

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I once uploaded a 10GB .pst to gmail using Google's migration tool...

https://tools.google.com/dlpage/outlookmigration

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One suboptimal approach is to have outlook where gmail and PST emails are set up and just drag emails to be copied from source to target folder.

You would have to manually replicate the folder structure. It will preserve attachments.

The problem is that it is very slow. E.g., one year of emails is best split to months 'batches' (if the upload fails).

Whole year of emails may take 10+ hours!

I wish gmail had a .pst file import feature.

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If you don't have administration acount in google apps. best way that for me finally works. http://www.mailstore.com/en/mailstore-home-email-archiving.aspx this soft. it can help for more the just import from outlook to gmail but other options to

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    If you are affiliated with the product, please disclose this in your answer. Thanks!
    – jonsca
    Commented Apr 28, 2014 at 20:24

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