Migrate Hangouts contacts to new Google account

Question

I have created a new Google account that I would like to use as my primary account in the future, and I'm trying to migrate as much as I can to the new account. However, I'm running into a little trouble with Gchat/Hangouts contacts.

I used the export feature to export my Gmail contacts as CSV and I was able to import the CSV into my new account without issue. My chat list, however, is still empty and I don't see the online status of my previous chat contacts. Is there any way to migrate these as well, short of re-sending invites to everyone?

Answer 1

It's important to note that Google switched it's 'chat' product/service from Google Talk to Google Hangouts in May 2013. The Google Talk chats (i.e., pre-switch) exist in a different data format than the Google Hangouts chats (i.e., post-switch). If you have chats spanning the switch you can see the difference by looking at what's in your Gmail label/folder "Chats". Anyway, this difference is important because Talk-chats and Hangouts-chats cannot generally be moved using the same method or tool (at least none that I can find).

Exporting Talk-chats: Basically these can just be treated as emails and exported using IMAP. See instructions at http://www.howtogeek.com/148036/how-to-migrate-your-google-account-to-a-new-one and at https://github.com/coandco/gtalk_export.