IMAP

How to Migrate Emails from One Gmail to Another Account?

Knowing how to migrate emails from one Gmail account to another properly is important because your old account contains years (if not decades) worth of email messages, receipts, invoices, and whatnot. Leaving all that data behind in an old account (even if it is an archive of Gmail email data) is never a good idea.

I have seen countless people who make a new account and rush the transfer, only to regret not using a proper guide. This is especially true after December 1, 2023, when Google enacted a new policy for permanently deleting accounts that remain inactive for more than 2 years without user permission. Trust me, you don’t want to be among those who lose a precious document only because they weren’t careful.

That being said, almost everyone has some basic idea of how to move emails from one Gmail account to another. You just open an email and forward it correctly. Well, you can follow this approach, and messages will move to the new account, but not without caveats.

Don’t worry, I will discuss not only that but also cover every other method available to transfer email data between two Gmail IDs. Including the one that preserves emails in Gmail along with your folder hierarchies and labels.

First, let’s discuss the various scenarios where people like yourself end up shifting their primary Gmail account.

Before moving ahead, let’s have a look at some user queries with regard to migration.

Why Users Want to Transfer Gmail Data to Another Gmail Account?

There is no better way than to hear it directly from the users themselves. So, look at some queries that I found on Gmail forums asking for a way to shift all data from an old Gmail account to a new one.

“Hi, I’m Ross. I was working on a particular Gmail account for the last 3 years, and now there are a lot of emails present in my account, and I am thinking of transferring them to another Gmail account. This is because it is taking up a lot of my storage space. Does any solution exist that can help me transfer my emails?”

“I’m Susain, my team was using the same Gmail account, but due to managing the same account on different devices. It’s getting full day by day, so being an admin, I’ve decided to provide different accounts to the members. For that, I am looking for a way to migrate all the Gmail emails to another account. But the main concern is to complete this migration process in less time, which will hinder productivity. Sadly, I don’t have a clue how to transfer emails from one Gmail account to another quickly. So, if anyone knows about batch migration, please suggest some solutions. Thanks in advance!!”

Based on these queries, users fall into one of these categories:

1. Want to change their Gmail user name (Google has added this feature, but it is currently restricted to the US).
2. Storage is full in the primary account, and for some reason, you are unable to delete emails from the Gmail account. It might be a good idea to shift messages to a different Gmail account.
3. They want to segregate Gmail into a personal and professional scope.

This list is not an end-all, be-all; there might be niche situations unique to you. However, despite the differences in requirements, the transfer process remains the same. So let me teach you the forwarding tactic I hinted towards earlier and explain to you why this is not adequate for a true transfer.

Steps to Forward Emails from One Gmail to Another

1. Log in to your source Gmail account.
2. Click on any message you want to send over.
3. Press the Forward button in the bottom ribbon.
4. In the New Email draft, add your destination @gmail.com address.
5. Hit Send and Repeat(2-5).

Now I know it’s not practical to wait for every new email that enters your inbox and forward it. Gmail has a built-in solution for such cases: The Auto-Forwarding rule. To set it up, follow this procedure.

1. Settings > See all Settings
2. Go to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab
3. Click on the “Add a forwarding address” button
4. Type your new Gmail address into the field and hit Next.
5. You might get prompted to log in to Gmail again, so do what the on-screen instructions say.
6. Once done, log in to the destination Gmail account and accept the forwarding role.

Why I Don’t Use Forwarding as My Gmail to Gmail Transfer

Although Gmail has now made its account creation more strict than ever before, incoming emails from other Gmail accounts are usually safe, but why take chances? So it’s my recommendation that you add your source account as a contact in your destination Gmail and vice versa, so that no messages get flagged as spam.

Another limitation you need to keep in mind while forwarding is that Gmail will alter the email metadata. This won’t change the message content, but makes the message incompatible from a compliance perspective. This extra 1-2 bytes of data per email might not seem like a lot, but when thousands of forwarded messages are added together it absorbs a significant chunk of your storage, especially if you use only the free 15 GB variant of Gmail.

Also Read: Steps to Download Gmail Data to Computer

If the one email at a time forwarding wasn’t enough, you also have to keep in mind the daily and hourly quota for sending messages in Gmail. Which is 100/hour and 500/day. Once you reach that limit for the time interval, all email activity gets paused from the server side. So even if you want to send an urgent message to someone, you can’t. Repeating this practice day after day is not feasible for anyone. So forwarding is the last thing you want to do to migrate emails between two Gmail accounts or any email accounts for that matter.

Practical Ways to Migrate Emails from One Gmail Account to Another Manually

Now that we are crystal clear that forwarding is a no-go, you might be thinking, what else do we have? Don’t worry, there are still plenty of DIY methods to move Gmail emails to another Gmail account. First up, we have the desktop email clients.

Now, as Gmail users, your primary way of monitoring mail is through the web, so you might not be aware of desktop email clients that come pre-installed on your computer.

For Windows users, it’s Outlook, and Mac users have Apple Mail. That’s not it; there are other open-source apps like Thunderbird that you can use for completing the procedure. The steps are largely the same.

• Start by adding both Gmail accounts to the email client.
• Then, if you want to make the process easier, open another instance of the same client and arrange both side by side in a split-screen.
• Finally, grab a bunch of emails from your old Gmail account and drop them into the new Gmail account.

This is the major limitation of the process. You have to be manually involved every step of the way. Moreover, a lack of reporting or any indicator means you have no idea how much data has shifted and how much is left. This leads to duplicates and missing emails. So try another method.

Import Emails from Old Gmail to New Gmail

Earlier, you would have to change Gmail to POP and then proceed with the import option, but this is no longer the case. In January 2026, Gmail ended POP3 support, citing a lack of security as the primary reason.

It is easy to import emails from an old Gmail account to a new Gmail account. Below are the steps to transfer Gmail to another Gmail account:

• Start your new Gmail.
• Go to the Settings option (gear).
• Click on the Accounts and Import Option.
• Select the Import Mail and Contacts link beside the “Import Mail and Contacts” option.
• Type the old Gmail address and Press the Next button.
• Follow the on-screen instructions as they appear.

You might also see a Check email from another account option, but that option, too, no longer works as intended after the POP settings were revoked.

Alternate Solution to Migrate Emails from One Gmail to Another

The above method may seem a little confusing to some users, especially non-technical users. They may find the process difficult to understand. Therefore, here we’ve discussed another easy solution that will help them easily transfer emails from one Gmail account to another. This particular approach involves FreeViewer IMAP Migration Tool, which is very simple to understand thanks to its user-friendly interface. It also offers direct migration from one Gmail account to another Gmail account without limiting the database.

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Furthermore, while transferring all emails, the overall data consistency and hierarchy of files and folders are maintained. The software also provides a date range filter option to migrate emails of a particular period. Once the migration is done, it will automatically generate a summary report at the end. This tool is a smart tool that allows you to easily transfer emails from your old Gmail account to another. This tool also supports the transfer of emails from different email platforms to Gmail without interruption.

Steps to Transfer Gmail to Another Gmail

• Download the professional migration tool for your existing Mac OS or Windows system.
• Inside the setup panel, keep IMAP as the source and destination endpoints. Also, check and select the Email workload, and enter the Date filter.
• From the source options, select the Gmail option and validate it.
• Then, in the destination IMAP account, choose Gmail. And, validate it.
• Then, download the CSV template. Add your Gmail accounts and reupload the datasheet to map the accounts.
• After final user level validation, click on Start Migration, and the Gmail to Gmail migration process will start automatically.

Conclusion

To migrate emails from one Gmail account to another is not a complicated task, but unprepared users may face various problems. I gave you manual and professional solutions in the above sections. It’s not the complexity that makes manual solutions fail, but the sheer amount of time and user effort required, especially when compared to the vastly superior automated approach. Hence, we suggest you use the professional, tried and tested tool discussed above to carry out the migration effortlessly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which is the fastest way to transfer all emails from one Gmail account to another?

Comparing speed directly might be difficult, as many of the methods require setup. However, as the tool offers a concurrent transfer facility, multi-account transfers become a lot faster when compared to DIY approaches.

Q: How many Gmail accounts can I have?

Google offers no such official metric; as per my own experience, the number lies somewhere between 5 and 7. If you try to make more accounts, Google will forbid you from doing so.

Q: Should I buy the Google One subscription instead of moving my data to a different account?

Google One is a continuous expense that you have to pay every month or year, based on your subscription type. However, if you make a new Gmail account, which is free, of course, and use the tool, which is just a one-time purchase, you can save a lot of money over time.

Q: Is it safe to move emails between two Gmail accounts?

Yes, all of the methods that I have described in this post are safe to implement. However, extra care must be taken if you use the manual methods, as all responsibility falls on your shoulders.