A reader commented on the last post, saying Outlook can be a client to Google Workspace. At first glance, that didn’t seem to help me much, since I was on a path to eventually eliminate the need for Outlook. But it gave me an idea for migrating emails from the Outlook clients to Gmail.
I set up a test account under Google Workspace, and connected one of my Outlook clients to it using IMAP. I was able to copy folders from the Exchange email to the Gmail section of Google Workspace. It was slow; perhaps two orders of magnitude slower than the SSL connection that Outlook uses to communicate with an Exchange server. But it worked.
Looking for a faster alternative, I downloaded Google’s pst to Gmail migration tool: Google Workspace Migration for Microsoft® Outlook, aka GWMMO. I exported an Outlook folder as a pst file, and uploaded it to Gmail using that tool. That worked, too, but it was no faster than letting Outlook use IMAP to do the job. I did a little research ans found that GWMMO also uses IMAP. I guess that means IMAP is the bottleneck. I decided to use Outlook to do the job.
I’m in the middle of this process, and it seems to be working fine, except that, with the Exchange server out of service, some older files are unavailable. If and when Rackspace gets their ransomware situation resolved and their Exchange servers back up, I’ll have to deal with merging the old emails, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
By the way, Rackspace has posted nothing today on the status of the outage. They have not been very communicative since they got hacked. That is ticking off some of their customers, including this one.
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