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Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

Gmail search often doesn't even work for me anymore, I simply can't understand how decisions are made at this company.

Is there a way to migrate all your email and maintain your Gmail address indefinitely?

I've had Google search barely working for me recently. Searching for "55U5863DB input lag" - fire first result: "missing: lag", multiple other results: "missing: 55U5863DB". I've also searched for "Actor Name Game Name" recently (I forgot forget which), and the first few results all had "missing: Game NAme".

Searching for anything specific is becoming tedious.

I've used imapsync before (link below). You configure in your gmail credentials on one side and your new account on the other. You'll want to set up "device" password for it to avoid any 2fa/not a robot checks. It does take a while due to google rate limiting (think days). But once you get it started, you can just let it run.

imapsync homepage: https://imapsync.lamiral.info/

imapsync github gmail faq: https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync/blob/master/FAQ.d/FAQ.G...

If I remember correctly (maybe four years ago) I just downloaded all my email over IMAP using some desktop client then re-uploaded onto Fastmail. It's a one time hassle but definitely worth it, especially if I had known what I had to do yesterday. I sifted through 10 years worth of email looking for train and plane tickets and hotel bookings etc because I needed to know exactly which dates I crossed which borders .. anyway off topic, a huge pain of course, but an easy task on Fastmail, where as my laptop gets brought to its heels every time I have to open my gmail inbox.

Oh and you can set gmail to forward everything to your Fastmail. You can even have it land in a separate folder to keep it all neat.

Lately I've had issues sending from my gmail account on Fastmail, I think google changed their security practices a while ago..

Our migration tools have at times been fragile (I myself tried and failed to migrate from Gmail about a year before I ended up working at FastMail—something about a Gmail security change that broke it), but I believe that they’re all working properly at present. We have a guide for migrating from Gmail in our documentation: https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/gmailimport.html. We’re planning improvements to the procedures, too, to make it easy to use rather than merely possible!

Google takeout offers mailbox format, & address stays active as long as you log into once in few months..

Just enable pop3 access (at least temporarily), and get your other inbox to import all the mail. Then set up forwarding in gmail. That's it.

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