
Ask HN: Importing email from Gmail to Fastmail - asterslash
Hello,<p>I&#x27;m currently migrating my email account to Fastmail from Gmail and I hit an interesting problem. Fastmail seems to have a great import tool to migrate your emails but being a privacy-conscious person I started to wonder if it was possible for an app-password from Gmail (I have two-step verification enabled) to limit its access to IMAP. I don&#x27;t currently distrust Fastmail but I would be feeling better if I knew they couldn&#x27;t mess with my Account Settings on Google (or gather my data from other services). From what I could gather online there aren&#x27;t granular permissions nor official information pointing to any IMAP-only app-password.<p>Given the stated problem I started to look for other solutions like imapsync but I currently have around 15GB of emails and it seems Google throttles downloads and uploads so it would take around 7 days, at least, to import all my email to Fastmail (and having to download them to a machine which would then upload to their servers).<p>Anyone here had a similar problem? How did you approach it?
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simon_acca
Personally I wouldn't entrust my emails to a provider that I trust so little
as to not abuse the trust of its users with their "Email import tool". That
is, if you even suspect that their "Email import tool" does shady things, I
don't see how you can be comfortable with hosting your mail with them.

That said, you could use the google takeout function [0] to download your
mail, and then upload via offlineimap of another similar tool. (I believe
google takeout produces a .mbox).

Finally, I also host with fastmail, a great choice so far :)

0: [https://takeout.google.com](https://takeout.google.com)

~~~
asterslash
Is not so much about me trusting the company but being sure nothing can be
done outside the scope I trust it, even if by mistake. It is also, from my
point a view, a failure from Google to provide a more granular access to its
services.

Did you personally use the import tool (assuming you previously used Gmail)? I
assume everything worked smoothly?

~~~
simon_acca
Completely agree on the granular access issue, companies with much smaller
engineering teams manage to do it!

I did use the import tool with no trouble but it was about 10x less data than
what you have. Given the 2.5GB/day bandwith cap of the gmail API/IMAP you
might really be better of with the takeout option though, doing the whole
operation from a machine possibly in a datacenter with a good uplink.

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gtirloni
The App Password you created for FastMail to access your Gmail account over
IMAP cannot be used for anything other than mail/chat/calendar. Additionally,
you have 2-step auth enabled so any access to change your account settings
would require that.

~~~
asterslash
Is the need for 2-step auth for account changes a documented feature? I'm
asking because I couldn't find anything pointing to that and, if so, it could
solve my initial problem.

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kngspook
Well, a couple points:

1\. It depends if you don't trust them in the long term or the short term. In
the long-term, after you finish the migration, there's no need for Fastmail to
still have access to your account, and Google does let you revoke/cycle app
passwords, so I would just do that and that would cut off Fastmail's access,
even if they did retain your password (which, based on what I know about them,
I doubt they'd do, but I don't know them personally).

2\. For the actual transferring, if you don't want to use Fastmail's tool, I'm
a big fan of imapsync, and my second best choice would be offlineimap. I like
the former for my needs, where I do a lot of one-shot
migrations/backups/restores, but the latter does have the benefit in your case
that it can be run as a daemon, and then it'll slowly steadily upload your
mail in the background over the course of however many days it'll take.

3\. It should not take 7 days to move 15GB. I've done it in under 48 hours.
Part of the bottleneck might be that your local machine/network/etc. I would
try to fire up a VM with a cloud provider, preferably one of the fast-network
variants, and run imapsync from there.

~~~
asterslash
Thank you for your suggestions!

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nickfromseattle
You can use a 3rd party service called MigrationWiz.com, it's used by F100s to
migrate their corporate email, but also works for consumer migrations.

I believe at one point it was done via IMAP, but Google changed their APIs and
you may have to grant greater access. I could be wrong here, it's been a few
years since I last worked there.

Hope this is helpful.

------
1996
there is no other good solution. start now by renting a server and it will be
done in 7 days.

