Email account to expire, need to move 2000 messages

Marty81

I have an email account that is set to expire in just a couple of weeks. This is bad because this has been my primary email account for the last several years, and there are about 2000 messages in there containing important health info, account information, etc. Not to mention the fact that I've given that email address as my address for damn near everything official I've signed up for in the last few years. I don't even know who all has this email address, and if I tried to update everyone with my new email address I'd surely forget about some people. I gather that I need to switch over to a more permanent email service, and right now I'm thinking about making gmail my primary service. This leaves me with some questions.

-I have a gmail account. Is there any way of sending all of my messages over to gmail's servers and having them all be accessible through gmail after my current account expires? Aside from forwarding every message by hand, that is...
-I need a forwarding service for my current email address. That is, if someone sends email to my current email address, I'd like for them to forward it along to my gmail account. Unless my current provider chooses to provide that service, I'm SOL, right?
-Any other advice?

Echo

Two first hits for "gmail import"

Exhibit A
Exhibit B

...but that seems to be unneeded. Go to Settings -> Account in Gmail and get your mail from your current POP3 account with that.

Marty81

Sweet, thanks. I just looked in my gmail account and didn't see any obvious ways to do it. I didn't even think to google it. Doh! Anyway, just to clarify, these messages are actually being moved onto gmail's servers so that I can access them in the future after my old account expires, right?

Kyanilis

Looking through the Gmail, it looks as though that each message is imported to Gmail and you have the option to leave it on the other server or not. This would mean that Gmail would have to keep its own local copy.

As far as the question on forwarding? Yeah, there's no way to "intercept" mail so unless your old service provides forwarding after the account has expired you are pretty much out of luck.

Cyvros

There is a way. I understand it works in Windows Mail, and probably in another mail clients, but I know that this definitely works in Thunderbird. You'll also quite definitely need to be able to use your existing e-mail account in a mail client (I've got a feeling that IMAP access to your existing e-mail account would be preferable, but I'm not entirely sure about this).

Set up your Gmail account using IMAP in whatever mail client you use. Make sure your existing account is also set up in that mail client and that all your messages are downloaded there.

After you've set up Gmail/IMAP in the client, you should have a series of folders. One of them should be All Mail. Drag-and-drop all your existing account's messages to All Mail. (You may also want to keep the downloaded messages firmly downloaded, just in case.)

This worked for me when I transferred a bunch of old mail to my Gmail account. Granted, I wasn't transferring that much mail... (I can't remember, but I think my filters worked on the imported mail, too. I was very pleased.)