Clean Your Inbox Before You Begin
There's one thing I recommend anyone does before changing their Gmail address: clean their existing inbox.
Think about it—do you really need to transfer that newsletter from 2015 that you never opened? Or those old promotional emails from stores you no longer shop at? I'm willing to bet you don't. In fact, you should go the extra mile not to move them to the new account to save valuable storage space and keep your new inbox clutter-free from the start.
My favorite tool for the job is an inbox cleaning app called Clean Email because it can reliably find and categorize all common kinds of unwanted messages (social media notifications, newsletters, old messages, and more) and perform inbox management actions (delete, archive, label, etc.) on them in bulk. To use it, simply sign in to Clean Email with your Gmail address and explore its cleaning options.
Methods to Transfer Emails From One Gmail Account to Another Gmail
There are always more ways to cook an egg, so to speak (we don't say anything bad about cats here!), and that's true even when it comes to switching Gmail accounts. The best choice for you depends on factors like the number of emails you need to transfer and your comfort level with technology.
Method 1: Use an Automated Third-Party Gmail Migration Tool
Gmail is the most popular email service in the world, and there's a whole ecosystem of third-party tools aimed at making the lives of Gmail users easier. Among these tools are migration tools, which can transfer all emails in just a few clicks, but they usually won't do it for free.
A good example that I've personally had a lot of success with is MailJerry. To transfer messages with it, you need to:
- Open MailJerry in your web browser or download its app.
- Enter information about your existing and new addresses, including your username and password.
- Verify if everything is set up correctly and then start the migration process.
MailJerry can migrate all folders (called labels in Gmail), check for duplicates, and verify there are no messages left in your old account that haven't been transferred. You can use it to migrate 250 MB of messages for free, but it costs $12.90 a month to migrate more data than that, so it's best for people with multiple Gmail accounts and proportionally greater migration needs.
📌 Tip: If you don’t fear the command line, then you can use Got Your Back (GYB) instead, which is free and open source.
Method 2: Manually Transfer Messages in Bulk
You can also transfer all messages from one Gmail account to another manually. Google knows that users can have many legitimate (and potentially embarrassing) reasons to switch accounts, so they've made it possible to do so even without third-party tools, but the process isn't exactly straightforward. Here are the steps it involves:
- Enable POP in your old Gmail account: To transfer all emails, you need to change Gmail settings to enable a protocol called POP, short for Post Office Protocol. You can do so from the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab in Gmail settings. For more detailed instructions, refer to the official help page.
- Initiate the import process in your new account: Once POP is enabled, you can switch Gmail accounts and navigate to Settings → Accounts and Import and select the Import mail and contacts option in the Import mail and contacts section.
- Connect your old account and customize import settings: Enter your old Gmail address and follow the prompts to sign in. You'll then be able to choose what you want to import. Make sure the Mail option is selected. Finally, you can start the transfer from one Gmail account to another and wait.
Depending on the size of your old inbox, the manual migration process can easily take a few hours, so be patient. But if you've cleaned your inbox using Clean Email as advised in the first section of this article, then at least you won't transfer old emails, so the wait shouldn't be too bad.
📌 Tip: Since you're almost guaranteed to keep receiving messages to the old address for quite some time after the migration, I recommend you set up automatic mail forwarding. That way, you won't miss any important messages sent to your old account.
Method 3: Manually Migrate Messages One By One
Sometimes, you only need to move a handful of specific messages, such as work-related emails or old invoices. To transfer selected emails, you can use a standard feature you may already be familiar with. Yes, I'm talking about forwarding. This is how it can work in practice:
- Open a message you want to transfer in Gmail.
- Click the three vertical dots in the top-right corner of the message and select the Forward option.
- Enter your new mail address and click Send.
- Repeat steps 1 to 3 until you've migrated all messages.
This method is great when you have only a few specific emails to migrate, but it can be exhaustingly time-consuming if your goal is to move your entire inbox.
You can actually forward multiple messages at the same time by selecting them in Gmail, right-clicking on any of them, and then choosing the Forward option. The only problem is that the messages will be forwarded as .eml attachments in a single message. This probably isn't what you want since .eml files can't be easily viewed in Gmail.
