Will Workspace email migration migrate folders and folder content?

[NeilL]

I'm looking to migrate from an IMAP email service to our new Workspace for Nonprofits.  I've used the migration tool and that seems to work to properly migrate the inbox and inbox contents.  The specific account I'm migrating from has a set of folders (a folder with subfolders in one case).  The migration tool seems to have created the folder structure but the target folders are empty.  Is this the expected behavior? If so, is there a way to migrate folder contents?  If not, is there some trick?

[StephenHind]

@NeilL the first thing to do is search for one of the emails you think is missing - if you've found it you know it's migrated and then you can check its labels to see which labels were applied.  Gmail may not follow exactly the folder structure of IMAP as in IMAP you can add folders to your Inbox but you cannot as sub-labels to the Inbox label in Gmail.

Let us know how you get on.

[NeilL]

Thanks for the response.  I did a search for several random email across multiple folders that are in the source system and found no trace of them in the target.

[StephenHind]

@NeilL that means the mails are not migrated at all.  Without seeing what you've configured I don't know what to suggest.  The migration tool migrates everything you tell it to and only excludes folders if you specify to exclude some folders.

One thing you may have missed is the date range for migration - did you set a date range broad enough to migrate everything?

[NeilL · Accepted solution]

I did set the range to include the oldest message. I finally gave up on the migration through Workspace and went the very long way around by

1. Installing Thunderbird on my Mac
2. Installing an Import/Export extension
3. Manually exporting each folder from my source to an mbox file
4. Manually importing each folder to my Thunderbird client
5. Selecting each message in the imported folder (in groups) and moving them into the proper target folder
Some long time later, I was done with all the email migrated.

[StephenHind]

I've used the Data Migration Service many, many times for many clients (I work for a Google Cloud Partner) and it's always been successful. Sorry it didn't appear to work correctly for you.

[NeilL]

Ya, I’m not sure what the difference would be exactly. The top level Inbox migrated without a problem but the folder with subfolders didn’t. I also tried moving one of the subfolders to the top level and migrating without any luck.

In any case, thanks for the help and advice.


Thanks Neil

[cidimage001.jpg@01D7641F.6A432CB0]
Neil Lamka
Mobile: 206-931-0229206-931-0229>
neil@jccwp.org
JCCWP Org206-931-0229>

[Caff]

I had a similar problem which I was able to solve without resorting to a manual import.

In my case it was caused by an imap folder in the source account that used a gmail reserved "system label" name.

In my case imap had folders like "Archive/Foo". The migration tool created a label by renaming it with a leading underscore: "_Archive" but created the subfolder labels like "Archive/Foo". Emails in Archive where imported and labelled _Archive but the emails in the subfolders in imap were not imported at all (tested with search).

The solution was to rename the parent folder before migration.

I could not find a definitive list of the reserved label and category names I think there is Archive, Archived, Travel, Purchases, Finance, Social, Updates, Forums, Promos. There is also a list of system labels at https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/guides/labels (although I presume the migration tool handles things like inbox, sent etc.).