Migrating GMail to Exchange (part 0)

Update: I have now posted a quicker procedure to migrate your GMail to MS Exchange here.

Recently I took on the project of migrating from GMail to MS Exchange.  This is being an arduous process.  While I see no sane reason why to move from GMail with it universal accessibility and ease of interface to Exchange, sometimes there are external reasons.  E.g. your IT department decided after their Google Apps trial that it is not for them.

This series of posts will document a way to do this, while at least keeping all your GMail labels with your messages.  There may be other, easier ways, but a simple Google search did not yield a useable result.

You will need to have Outlook (part of MS Office) for this process.  Exchange (or Outlook at least) allows you to attach 'categories' to each item.  We will use these instead of GMail's labels.  Good news: I was able to translate all of my GMail filters to Outlook rules, albeit these have to run on the client (e.g. Outlook).  I'm sure you'll be able to do the same.

This guide is written for Outlook 2010, but should also work similarly for Outlook 2003 or 2007.  Note of caution: the conversion will take a LOT of time.  In my case it is taking 2.5 seconds/email/label.  You will not be able to use Outlook during the conversion. I recommend using Outlook Web Access if you have to access Exchange during the conversion, unless you have access to another machine.

We will use GMail's IMAP interface to access your old mail.  In this interface, there is a folder for each label, and a message will appear in ALL of the folders of its labels.  Outlook will see each of these copies as separate emails.  However, after the conversion, all of these copies will be consolidated into a single email with the labels represented as categories.

Limitation

Chat messages are not exported to IMAP, so they will not be migrated to Outlook.

Update: I have now posted a quicker procedure to migrate your GMail to MS Exchange here.

Let's begin...