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After going through internet newsgroups, endless trials and nearly smashed keyboard, I finally managed to move my emails from my Gmail account to a new one. Actually the new one is the GAFYD (Google Applications for your Domain), but it’s the same thing, it works through Gmail interface.

The best of all is that the emails will retain the correct timestamp, so something I have received into my Gmail account on 28/07/2006 will arrive to my GAFYD account with the same date and time on it. Nice!

First, you need to log into your Gmail account and enable POP3 access. Click on Settings, Forwarding and POP and tick Enable POP for all mail.

Now go to your new Gmail (GAFYD) account and click Settings, Accounts, Add another mail account. In the window that opens type your old Gmail address and press Next Step.

You need to fill out the form on the next page by entering your old Gmail account username and password, and select “Other” for POP server, then enter 66.249.93.109 and press Add Account.

The setup will ask you if you would like to use this email address in a way that you are able to send email from your new account as you were sending it from the old one, very handy when replying to some emails sent to the old address. If you select “Yes” you will need to verify your old email address. It’s as simple as receiving a confirmation email and entering the confirmation code into the setup window of the new account.

That’s it! Just sit and wait and your old emails will slowly start popping up in your new Gmail (GAFYD) account after a while. Of course if you have few thousands of them, it may be wise idea to go and do something else for some time while this is being transferred.

Please note that you will not be able to transfer labels that have been applied to the messages on your old account. However, you can generate and automatically apply one for all emails that are coming from the old address.

Since Yahoo! mail also supports POP access, I haven’t tried it but I don’t see any reason why this shouldn’t work with their accounts, or any other POP accounts out there.