Bring your old mailbox
Your history, threaded as it was.
Upload an export and every message arrives in its conversation, on its original date, in the folder it lived in. Running it again adds nothing twice.
In short
What is a mailbox import?
Changing provider means moving your history too. An import reads an archive of old messages and writes each one in, dated and threaded as it was.
3
headers a thread can anchor on
2
fields a duplicate matches on
4
file types it reads
How it works
Threads rebuild themselves
Each message is threaded by its first References entry, then In-Reply-To, then its own id, so an export that keeps them rebuilds every thread and joins mail that arrives later.
Filed where it lived
Inbox mail lands in Inbox with its unread state, sent mail in Sent, and the rest in Archive. Gmail labels come across as labels.
Running it twice adds nothing
A message matches on its message id and sender, never on an id made here, so a second run skips every copy already in your mailbox.
What you get
In the product today
Dated as sent
Dates come off the message, so a 2019 thread would sort as 2019.
A quiet ingest
Imported mail skips the notifications, rules, forwards and summaries new mail gets.
Any export file
Google Takeout, .mbox, .eml, .zip and .tgz, up to 100 GB a file.
Good practice
Getting the most out of it
- 01
Ask for the export
Every provider exports an archive on request. Get yours before you move.
- 02
Keep whole messages
Choose mbox or .eml, which keep every header, so the threads survive the move.
- 03
Keep the old account
Leave it open until you have the export and have checked that it opens.
Where it stands
Good to know
- Reading a live account
- Mail comes across from an export file. Reading an account directly, over IMAP or an Outlook sign-in, is not built yet.
- Outlook data files
- A .pst file from desktop Outlook cannot be read yet. Export to .mbox from another mail app first.
- Messages over 50 MB
- A single message larger than 50 MB is listed as not imported rather than stored.
Questions
Asked often
Keep going
Works well with
Start
Your domain,
your mail.
Point a domain at OpenEmail and read it in a mailbox built around it. The free plan covers one domain.
