Importing email into Gmail from Zimbra exported file

Question

I've managed to rip myself away from Zimbra and get myself some Gmail goodness.

Unfortunately, I'm not quite ready to give up my archive of 5000+ emails from the last few years just yet and would very much like to import them into my Gmail inbox.

Because Gmail has now taken over my old inbox, I can no longer retrieve my old emails directly from it, so I've had to export them. These are dropped into a tar.gz file which contains .eml files and .meta files, and the same folder structure as I require.

Any ideas on how I'd get them into Gmail from this file? I've looked around but it seems that tools that would/could do it are no longer available or supported.

Answer 1

If you can import the EML files into a mail client that support IMAP this will be easy.

It seems that Thunderbird can do this, but I'm not 100% sure. (Don't have a local copy to play with.)

Anyway, set-up Thunderbird to be an IMAP client for Gmail. (Lifehacker has an excellent guide to do this.)

Then, import your EML files into Thunderbird.

If necessary, move them to a temporary folder (called "Zimbra" perhaps) which will be a label in Gmail. Then just wait for IMAP to sync them all to the cloud.

After that you can delete Thunderbird, keep it around to make local archives of your e-mail, or keep using it as your main client.

I was able to do this a couple of years ago with thousands of messages from my Pegasus Mail client. (There was some pain in converting to a format that Thunderbird could read, but getting the messages into Gmail was the easy part.)

Answer 2

Use the ImportExportTools add-on in Thunderbird. Within seconds you can import .eml files to Thunderbird.

If you have added Gmail to Thunderbird, Gmail will then do a sync within no time.