Migrating GMail to Exchange (part 5) - Finishing the migration

Once you have finished your migration process, you need to reset your GMail and Outlook settings that you have changed for the migration.

1. Outlook settings

In order for your migration to be smooth, you will need to disable most automatic Outlook actions to your e-mails, otherwise, these will interfere with or during the migration process.

A. Remove your IMAP account from Outlook.

Go to File => Account Settings => Account Settings... . In the Account Settings dialog, select your IMAP account and click on Remove.  Say yes to the confirmation dialog.

B. Add back any tracking automation you want

Under File => Options => Mail, under Tracking header

• Select your desired options for handling a read receipt, and processing meeting and tracking information.

C. Enable Junk Mail filter if needed

If you disabled Junk Mail globally (including blocked senders), you may want to reenable it after your mail import is complete.  Simply delete the DisableAntiSpam entry underf HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook.

For more info, see this post.

D. Re-enable Reminders

Go to File => Options => Advanced, under Reminders header, re-enable reminders if you want a sound notification for events.

2. GMail server settings

In the IMAP settings:

• reenable Auto-Expunge on
• remove the limit of messages in the IMAP folders (Do not limit the number of messages in an IMAP folder)

But wait... what about the other information in your Gmail account?  To import your Calendar and Contact settings into Outlook,

3. Import your Gmail calendar

To import a calendar from Google Calendar into Outlook follow these steps:

• Go to your calendar
• Click on "My Calendars" if your individual calendars are not expanded
• Hover over the name of the calendar you want to import, and click on the down arrow that appears
• Select Calendar settings from the menu
• At the bottom of the page, under the "Private Address:" heading, there will be a green ICAL button ( ).
• Click on it to reveal a web address for your calendar.  Copy the address.
• In Outlook, select your Calendar.
• In the ribbon, click on Open Calendar button, and select From Internet...

• Paste the address you have copied, and your events should be imported.

• Alternately, you can right-click on the ICAL icon to save your calendar data locally, and you can import it to Outlook using File => Open => Open Calendar

You will need to repeat these steps for each calendar that you want to import.

NOTE: I have found that this may not work on the Google Apps calendars.  However, you can download all of your calendars in a .zip file by:

• click the down arrow next to "My Calendars"
• select Settings
• Click on Export Calendars link; a zip file containing all of your calendars will download.
• You can double click on the .ics files in the .zip file to open them in Outlook

NOTE 2: After you have imported your Gmail calendar(s) into Outlook, they will show up as separate calendars.  You can move these calendars under "My calendars", but they will still function as separate calendars.  If you want to move the items into your main calendar, you can do this:

• select your calendar
• Under the View ribbon, click Change View, and select the List icon
• Now your calendar items can be selected and dragged & dropped into another calendar.
• After you moved your calendar items, you can delete the empty calendar folder.

4. Import your Gmail contacts

You can easily export your Gmail contacts using Outlook CSV format, and import it into Outlook, as described here.

• Go to your Gmail contacts.
• Under the More dropdown, select Export...  A dialog will appear.
• Select "All contacts", "Outlook CSV" and click Export
• A contacts.csv file will be downloaded.
• In Outlook, select File => Open => Import
• In the dialog box, select "Import from another program or file", then click Next
• Then, select "Comma Separated Values (DOS)", then click Next
• Select what you want to do with duplicate values (e.g. allow duplicates to be created)
• Click Browse... and open the contacts.csv file you downloaded
• Select the destination folder (e.g. Contacts), then click Next
• Click on Map custom fields... and a very confusing dialog box appears where you can map any custom Gmail field you created to an Outlook field.  Unfortunately, the dialog box will not tell you which fields you have already mapped, so this may be a tedious process as you map each and every field.
• When ready, click OK, then click Finish, and the import will take place.

5. What's remaining?

Your chat history does not show up in IMAP, and thus, it cannot be moved to Outlook.  You may find this post helpful if you want to export your chats.  Otherwise, there is the old copy and paste into you favorite document file.