One of the benefits of this is that instead of my emails being sent as "mygmailaddress on behalf of the_email_address_I_tell_people" people now just see that the email is being directly from my email address.
But that seems to be a very minor gain for the nightmare it has been transferring to Google Apps. I am honestly surprised that it is such a complicated transition. I have a Google account with Gmail, Documents, Google+ Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and a range of other services connected. Now I have a Google Apps account. Since I already had my email address linked up to my Gmail account, I was hopeful that the transition would be easy. How wrong I was!
I did a bunch of Googling, and found a number of helpful guides, but even still, the transition is only half complete.
Here is the best article I found:
Migrating from Gmail to Google Apps
It covers Email, Calendar, Documents, Feeds, Bookmarks and some other services.
Here my notes in case they're useful for you:
Migrate GMail > Google Apps Mail
The first challenge was to move all my existing mail to my new Google Apps mail account. There are a number of suggested ways to do this, and even companies that will do it for you (paid service of course).
In the end the way I had to do it was via POP! On my original Gmail address I enabled pop. (Settings > Forwarding and POP). In my new Google Apps account I then added my Gmail address as a pop account for it to check.
Some things to keep in mind:
- I told it to skip the inbox when using that POP account. Once the emails were all downloaded I went and adjusted the rule, so that new emails sent to my old Gmail account no longer skip the inbox.
- All the mail was received as "Unread". You can mark all mail in your account as "read" by creating a filter. Basically: Settings > Filters > Create a filter that says "Doesn't have the words" - and insert a random string of characters that none of your emails will have. e.g. adfadhdafyuafhadfe Then tell it to mark all that email as Read. Just remember to delete the rule after you make it! Otherwise your emails will continue to be marked as read.
There's a simple video example here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxzTFADzk2c
- It doesn't preserve your labels or filters. This was a bit annoying, but quickly solved. Go to Settings > Labs > and turn on "Filter Import/Export". You can then export all the filters from Gmail and import them into Google Apps. Explanation here:
http://lifehacker.com/5164463/import-and-export-your-gmail-filters
I told it to run all the filters on existing email, so any automated labels were put back on. The only labels I couldn't retrieve were manually added labels, which I'm not too worried about. - In my old Gmail account I then archived all mail in the inbox. So now when I log into mail, if I see that there is no email in the inbox I know I'm logged in via the wrong Google account. (As you can tell from this comment, I'm not an "Inbox Zero" perfectionist!)
Migrating Documents
I read a few articles and in the end decided that downloading all the documents from my old account and re-uploading them into my new account was the best way forward.
I could have just shared the documents, but I couldn't change the ownership of them that way.
Migrating Google Analytics
I run a MCC (My Client Centre) account, so I can see multiple clients in one dashboard. Unfortunately there is no way to give another user admin access to MCC. So instead I had to go into each account and add my new Google Apps account as user with admin access.
Blogger
For Blogger I went to the settings for a specific blog, and added my new Google Apps account as an author.
Overall, my aim was to finish using my Gmail account and now use my new Google Apps account for everything. But after working through this so far, it appears that a full transition is going to be very difficult for many products. So I think I'm now stuck with two Google accounts!
I sincerely hope that Google will work on easy migration from a personal Google account to Google Apps accounts very soon!!
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