Migrating from Yahoo! Mail to Gmail

Lately I've been getting increasingly frustrated with Yahoo! It began when I started noticing random news snippets were inserted into half of my emails when I viewed them on my phone. Just recently I've noticed the search feature has been struggling to find messages when searching by Subject even though I could manually find them if I sorted by Subject.

Switching to Gmail

Because I have an Android device and use Google calendar it makes sense to move to a Gmail account. Luckily I had already created one before all the good names got taken. After looking into the migration steps I decided that safest method would be the following.

• In Gmail browse to Settings then Accounts and Import and click Add a POP3 mail account you own.
• I would strongly recommend labelling all of the emails as Yahoo Inbox for sorting purposes.
• I would also strongly recommend making sure you don't leave a copy of your email on the Yahoo server so you can track the progress.

There are definitely a few quirks with Gmail's Mail Fetcher. Firstly it only grabs 200 mails at a time and second it actually takes quite some time to process each message. I think this is due to the the way Google indexes the messages. Finally there is no way to make it continuously check the Yahoo server. It seems to do everything at its own pace (remarkably slow...)

Issues

Besides only checking 200 emails at a time, there were a few other issues. The first problem was that Yahoo's mail server starts complaining and sends back "In use" messages to Gmail. This means the transfer goes even slower.

In my case it immediately grabbed 200 messages, got kicked out by Yahoo and then waited 4 minutes before grabbing the next 200. 20 minutes later it had only just processed the first 200 messages.

The other issue was that a few messages absolutely would not transfer over. The issue seems to be that they had suspicious attachments (mostly zip files). Oh well... Nothing much that can be done about that.

Moving folders other than Inbox

By making use of the label imported messages features I was able to copy all of my other folders into the Inbox and then have them get imported into Gmail with the correct Label. The only catch was that sometimes legitimate messages would arrive while the import was going on and they would then get labelled incorrectly. By doing this step at night I limited this to just a few messages.

After a couple of nights I had moved over 11000 messages. It was definitely tedious but very worth it. Good riddance Yahoo!

Actual Progress Log

5 July 2012 02:46 200 mails fetched. 2395 mails remaining.
5 July 2012 02:45 Authentication error.
Server returned error "[AUTH] Incorrect username or password. (error 999)"
5 July 2012 01:52 198 mails fetched. 2596 mails remaining.
5 July 2012 01:49 200 mails fetched. 2794 mails remaining.
5 July 2012 01:26 199 mails fetched. 2995 mails remaining.
5 July 2012 00:49 200 mails fetched. 3192 mails remaining.
5 July 2012 00:45 Authentication error.
Server returned error "[IN-USE] maildrop busy."
5 July 2012 00:45 200 mails fetched. 3392 mails remaining.
5 July 2012 00:42 Authentication error.
Server returned error "[IN-USE] maildrop busy."
5 July 2012 00:41 199 mails fetched. 3593 mails remaining.
5 July 2012 00:38 Authentication error.
Server returned error "[AUTH] Incorrect username or password. (error 999)"
5 July 2012 00:35 200 mails fetched. 3792 mails remaining.
5 July 2012 00:31 Authentication error.
Server returned error "[IN-USE] maildrop busy."
5 July 2012 00:30 200 mails fetched. 3992 mails remaining.
5 July 2012 00:26 200 mails fetched. 4192 mails remaining.
5 July 2012 00:14 200 mails fetched. 4392 mails remaining.
5 July 2012 00:11 200 mails fetched. 4592 mails remaining.
Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 11:36 PM 200 mails fetched. 4790 mails remaining.
Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 11:32 PM Authentication error.
Server returned error "[IN-USE] maildrop busy."
Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 11:32 PM 200 mails fetched. 4990 mails remaining.
Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 11:30 PM One mail fetched.
Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 11:28 PM One mail fetched.