Since I purchased Google paid storage (200GB for $50/year), I migrated all of my mail out of my Google Apps account and back into my original Gmail account. I started to do this by copying and pasting folder using IMAP access via Thunderbird with the accounts opened. That worked pretty well except for the fact that it was slow and then I ran into bandwidth limitations of Gmail accounts so the process started taking a really long time.

To get around that I used the recommeneded method of Gmail account migration which is to set up the source account as a POP account from within the destination account. That worked okay for a while, downloading 200 messages at a time and then it stopped working for about a week and I more or less gave up.

Today I noticed that it started working correctly again so I guess Google fixed something, but I found a problem with the process. A while back my email campaign system didn’t specify the date in the header when it was sending out messages so there were lots of messages in my Apps email which didn’t have date headers in them so the date of the message was the date received by the email application. So it seems now that my Gmail account has downloaded all of those Apps messages, the date specified on them now is when they were downloaded again, instead of the original date of download. This makes complete sense to me but it was rather confusing when I searched for some mail this morning.

The end result here is that my mail is now all in one Gmail account. 6GB of mail used of my 207.2GB of storage.