Moving Messages to a Gmail Account from Thunderbird E-mail

Posted by: rrichar2 on June 19, 2012Tags: Gmail, thunderbird

This is a method to downloading and saving e-mail from Bates Gmail. This allows for folders and individual messages to be moved/saved to another e-mail program, rather than a long text file, opened in Wordpad.

1. Download and install Thunderbird for free on your personal computer by going to http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/. Configure Thunderbird for Bates Gmail. (Instructions). Thunderbird will allow you to save all of your mail to your own computer.
2. Setup a personal Gmail account (http://mail.google.com/mail/signup/) if you do not already have one. (It’s FREE).
3. Follow the instructions (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=180189) to add your personal gmail account to Thunderbird.  Also please consult the additional settings instructions for Thunderbird on http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78892
4. In Thunderbird, drag the folders from your Bates Gmail account to your personal gmail account. All the messages in the folder will be copied into gmail. Depending on the number of messages, this may take awhile.
5. Setup Email forwarding so new messages coming into your Bates account will be forwarded to your Gmail account.