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Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: otter on May 05, 2015, 11:07:53 AM

Title: Moving email from a webmail account to another account
Post by: otter on May 05, 2015, 11:07:53 AM
I hope this is not considered too, well, off-topic, but if nothing else doing this is in service of the Mustachian goal of ending a service that I pay for but no longer need!

I migrated my primary email to gmail years ago, but I still have an Earthlink email account - this was my primary for many years, and quite some years ago, when I still used it, I had my them move my mom's address over to my account from my dad's (this might have been done when he died - I don't remember) Last fall I asked my mom to start migrating over to another email account so I could close this - there really is no reason to pay for it every month. She's done that, but what both of us are now left with is a lot of archived email on the web that we would like to migrate to...somewhere else. Probably our primary email accounts. Then I can close the account and save a small but useful amount of money.

What is the best and/or easiest way to do this?

Title: Re: Moving email from a webmail account to another account
Post by: seattlecyclone on May 05, 2015, 11:17:15 AM
Does Earthlink offer POP access? You could download your old messages to the desktop email client of your choice with this.
Title: Re: Moving email from a webmail account to another account
Post by: otter on May 05, 2015, 11:54:24 AM
Oh!! I totally forgot about it - yes, they do, and it was how I read my email for years and years and years. So I can download it to the mail client on my desktop or whatever. But is there a way for me to read it all from gmail?
Title: Re: Moving email from a webmail account to another account
Post by: seattlecyclone on May 05, 2015, 03:57:02 PM
Aside from writing a script to iterate over all of your old mails and forward them to Gmail, I don't think so. Even this would make all of your old messages appear to have been received today.
Title: Re: Moving email from a webmail account to another account
Post by: Cathy on May 05, 2015, 04:43:28 PM
Gmail supports downloading messages from another mail account over POP3 into your Gmail account: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/21289?hl=en

If for some reason you want an unnecessarily hardcore solution rather than using POP3, Gmail also supports IMAP+ so it may be possible to inject messages into your Gmail inbox with arbitrary timestamps (and arbitrary headers in general).
Title: Re: Moving email from a webmail account to another account
Post by: seattlecyclone on May 05, 2015, 05:46:13 PM
Huh, I didn't know about that feature. Thanks for sharing!