Manually Migrate Gmail IMAP to Office 365

Admin | How to's | 5 minutes read | Last updated on February 8th, 2023,

Gmail / G Suite is a profile web-based application which offers to the requirements of organizations and induvial of various size. But Office 365 is a perfectly suitable application for enterprise and big organizations. However, if you want to export your G Suite / Gmail IMAP Data to Office 365, here are steps you need to follow.

Manually Migrate Gmail IMAP to Office 365

If you looking for a manual process to export Gmail data to Office 365, then below mention steps will guide you.

1 – Verify the Domain that you own

If you can log-in successfully to your domain administrator account, then you can generate the DNS record for your domain, and this is sufficient for Office 365 that you own the name of the domain. Verify the domain name is the first step to migrate Gmail / G suite to Office 365.

2 – Add Users to Office 365

Adding users into Microsoft Office 365 needs licenses for every single user. Each user is selected to have a Microsoft Office 365 mailbox before exporting emails.

3 – Collate the list of Email IDs on Microsoft Excel

Although making exporting files, you must have passwords of Gmail ID that is being exported. You can make bunched as per your need to migrate all the Gmail / G Suite Data, saving you the difficulty of exporting everything at once. Almost 50K mailboxes like up to 10 MB can be easily exported in one batch where each user will be allocated one row.

Log-in to G Suite / Gmail admin user console, select the ‘Users’ option.

Select each user’s name and note down their email address corresponding to it.

Next, log-in to Microsoft Admin. Go the ‘Users’ option. Then click ‘Active users.’

Besides it, remember the username column & Microsoft Office 365 admin window.

Open Microsoft Excel.

Put Address in cell A1, and username in cell B2, and password in cell C1. See the image below:

It is very difficult to remind every password, so what you can do is, you can reset them temporarily during the process.

A1 = Email Address for Office 365 domain

B2 = Email Address (earlier) on G Suite / Gmail

C3= Temporary password

Once you have collected all the email IDs, save the excel file in the CSV format.

4 – Formation of Migration Points

Any migrations technically occur through migration endpoint. Thus, you need to make a migration endpoint to join Office 365 to Gmail / G Suite account. Here’s how you can create migration endpoint(s).

⇨In the Exchange Admin Center, do the following instructions:

Go to Recipients >> Migration >> More…

Then choose the Migration endpoints.

Then click on the “New +”.

Then select the IMAP (as G Suite / Gmail is IMAP-based), and in the IMAP migration page, save the default settings as it is. The server should be on imap.gmail.com.

Next, follow the required instructions. Then, click on the ‘New’ for the formation of a new migration endpoint.

Now you need to create groups of mailboxes. This will helps you to separate the mailbox as per your primacy. It is also beneficial for analysis of your migration before go through the bulk migration.

5 – Migrating Mailboxes in Batches

Open Admins center and select Exchange.

Follow the instructions:

Recipients >> Migration

Then >> New + >> then Migrate to Exchange Online

IMAP migration >> then Next >> select Move configuration. Here you can sort the name of the migrating group. Like, Batch1.

The default group/batch name shown is the migration. If you don’t want to migrate any particular folder with that batch, then you can use the filter to exclude specific folders.

Once you clicking Next, on the Batch page ⇨ click on Browse if you would like to send a migration report copy to some users. Choose new after robotically starting the batch.

When you see the Syncing message, the migration has been started.

Once the process starts, you can see the migrated mailboxes. You can check the batch name on the dashboard of the Exchange admin center. Login to the pages of Office 365. Enter your username and password and check if incoming and outgoing emails properly working or not.

6 – Pointing MX Record to MS Office 365

The DNS records required to verify that your domain has been transformed from Google (Gmail / G Suite) to Office 365. Previous, all your emails were transported to Gmail as the MX record was pointed to Gmail / G Suite. MX record supports the incoming emails to store in one specific inbox. There are so many guidelines to change MX record for different DNS systems. Earlier you stop synchronization with Gmail / G Suite, you need to wait for at least 72 hours as it takes that much for other email systems to identify the MX record modification.

And after 72 hours, you can discontinue synchronization with Gmail.

7 – Disabling Gmail / G Suite Synchronize with Office 365

This is the last task for G Suite / Gmail mailboxes to Office 365 migration. When MX record has been pointed to Office 365 for at least 72 hours, then you can probably stop disable synchronization between the Office 365 and G Suite / Gmail. Confirm all emails are being moved to Office 365 before removing the batch migration and stop syncing. Delete the batch migration in Exchange Admin Centers. Check that the batch migration is not shown on the migration dashboard, which means that Gmail IMAP to Office 365 migration has worked.

Once the migration is finished, you can self-sufficiently import all your G Suite / Gmail Contacts and Calendar into Office 365.

The Manual Process of Gmail to IMAP Office 365 is very Complicated. Can I Outsource?

You can get tired by manually exporting the Gmail mailbox to Office 365. Although the manual process looks very simple from the outside it can be very difficult and time tasking which requires technical knowledge and required full attention. If you are looking for a simple solution that helps you to export Gmail IMAP Data into Office 365 directly, then you should defiantly look at the IMAP Backup tool. Follow some steps and you can easily export Gmail / G Suite IMAP Data to Office 365.