Exporting email for another company and maintaining labels

[danieldibono]

We need to export several users' mailboxes to give to a company that is acquiring us. They are on office365 and they want the labels in gmail to be maintained in the export to be created as folders. 

Eg. not one large list of emails including sent items but a a folder created in outlook for each label that was in the users' account previously.

Can this be done through the GUI, Vault and/or GAM?

Anyone get this to work? Would appreciate some feedback on the direction they took to accomplish this. 

I originally gave an export from Vault but apparently it was just a chronological data dump with no folder organization. 

[cryptochrome]

It really depends on what you are using to migrate the emails over. Workspace has nothing built in to transfer emails out to M365. Typically, migration tools either use old-school IMAP (slow!), in which case labels will be represented as folders, or they tap right into the API. And then it really depends how that piece of software is handling labels. 

I recommend you take a look at cloudm.io and their Migrate product. It's painless, low-effort, low-price, and does exactly what you want. 

[JasonTM1]

My Outlook/Exchange knowledge is admittedly a bit rusty. But could you configure Outlook to use the Gmail account and then export to a PST file? Outlook might process the Gmail labels as folders and then maintain this structure during the export.

Again, I apologize is this is a dated method.

[Marcin_Milewski]

Hi @danieldibono ,

In order to maintain labels with the e-mails, you can also export a single user mailbox as MBOX file by using Google Takeout, and then importing the MBOX file to the destination - this method should maintain labels as folders (when doing Takeout you can choose which labels to export) - I've tried this with email clients and it worked. 

If this is gonna work for you, you could think about automating it a bit, to not need to switch users in order to export the MBOX. If you have a lot of users to export, you can try GYB (a CMD tool, maintained by Jay Lee from Google).

By using this tool you should be able to impersonate users and export mailboxes as MBOX. It also supports service accounts. Then you only need some method to import that file to the destination, but I am pretty sure that there's a tool that allows you to do that.  

Hope this helps,
Best,
Marcin

[danieldibono · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

We ended up going with Bit Titan and also Office365 exchange online native migration tool that allows you to specifically bring in Google Workspace mailboxes.

MBOX was not an option for us and export to PST since were were dealing with nearly 100 mailboxes and it would take too long.