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Ask HN: Importing email from Gmail to Fastmail

15 points by asterslash ↗ HN
Hello,

I'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't currently distrust Fastmail but I would be feeling better if I knew they couldn't mess with my Account Settings on Google (or gather my data from other services). From what I could gather online there aren't granular permissions nor official information pointing to any IMAP-only app-password.

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).

Anyone here had a similar problem? How did you approach it?

9 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 19.8 ms ] thread
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

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.

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

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.