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Comment by jumpCastle | Hacker News Reader

I have a question about fastmail: I tried migrating from gmail but the original date of the emails didn't transfer. Anyone knows how to solve it? I had to go back to gmail since it's a deal breaker and I couldn't find a solution, but I really want to leave gmail (so I can have a direct relationship with the service provider without advertisers involve)

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This has been broken in gmail for a while. It's IMAP handling is non-standard. In a pinch, I once used an old copy of thunderbird to migrate gmail->gmail via IMAP. I had to disable some account security settings on google's side to even get thunderbird to connect. (Other IMAP clients had the symptom you describe). This was 3 or 4 years ago, YMMV.

How were you trying to migrate? I've been doing a Gmail->FastMail migration and I definitely had no issues with original email dates.

It was a few months ago, so I don't remember exactly, but I believe I followed the instructions that fastmail provided. If you say you didn't have this problem then I will try again.

Thanks for the answer

In my case, FWIW, I used an IMAP-compatible mail client (Outlook), and dragged my crud from one mailbox to the other. I did have some issues where mail conversations where different messages were under different labels ended up in not copying fully over, but that's partly because I migrated section by section.

Also, of course, note that if you have a mail message under two Gmail labels, and use IMAP to copy your folders, you'll probably end up with two copies of that message.

Migrating out of Gmail, FWIW, is still a pain because they are so nonstandard now.

But I never had an issue with the dates on the emails.

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