I recently decided to migrate one of my brands’ email accounts from Zoho Mail to Gmail. Google Apps has many more features than just Gmail and we were also having some spam issues with Zoho Mail so the move was a no-brainer really.
The only disadvantage is that Gmail is not free for business use with your own domain, but the price is worth paying, especially if you don’t require a large number of mailboxes/users.
In any case, my biggest headache was how to replicate the same mailboxes I had on Zoho Mail and move the thousands of emails from Zoho to Gmail. At first, I looked at export/import facilities in both services, however, it turned out that the solution is much simpler.
The best way to migrate is to install a mail package on your laptop, in my case I used the free Thunderbird. There are many others, take your pick or use whatever you have installed already.
Secondly, set up the Zoho Mail inboxes on Thunderbird with an IMAP connection. You also need to create the inboxes in Gmail and enable IMAP (it’s off by default). Then, also set up the Gmail accounts in Thunderbird. Once they can all connect it’s time to work the magic.
Let’s say I have a Zoho Mail inbox named [email protected] and I have set up the same one on Gmail entitled [email protected]. Once they are both able to connect from Thunderbird, what I do is access the Zoho Mail inbox, select all emails, then drag and drop into the same inbox on Gmail. That way the emails will be moved from Zoho Mail’s inbox to the Gmail one. That’s it, easy as pie.
Once you transfer all the emails in this manner, you will also need to set up folders (labels in Gmail) and filters. I suggest you set up the filters within Gmail itself rather than your email client on the laptop. That way you can switch clients at a later stage without having to set up the filters again. Gmail also has a great filtering system so there is no reason to use anything else.
It’s really easy to migrate from one email host to another using IMAP connections. The same procedure described above can, in fact, be used to migrate between any two email hosts that support IMAP.
If you want to keep using free Gmail and still want to use your domain name in your email, you can use the Improv.mx forwarding service.
thanks for sharing such a nice blog. Most of the people migrate from the Zoho Mail to Gmail due to its features.
Hi there,
I would like to provide one easy approach to convert Zoho to Gmail. For this first you need to export Zoho mails to PST file format. For this you can take the help from SysTools Zoho backup tool. After the completion of this step, you can perform PST to Gmail migration by using Outlook to G Suite Migrator tool from SysTools itself. I must say it will help you to perform Zoho Mail to Gmail conversion in a perfect way.
Thanks & Regards
Eva Suzan Adom
You can check out the steps described in googl’s official support forum https://support.google.com/a/answer/6351474?hl=en
Thanks! I’m planning to move from Zoho to G Suite in future, and am pleased to know there’s an option for this.
This is a great article, however, Google has now added a migration feature that allows you to point to the IMAP server directly from Zoho and it will handle your migration for you
Excellent, glad to hear it was useful and good to know about the migration tool.
Hi Eric,
Thank you for the input. Can you point me to that migration feature Google has?
Also, when you say “it will handle your migration for you” what parts will it handle, and what parts do you still have to take care of?
Is there a migration process outline someplace, showing each step? For instance, to know whether we first need to transfer the domain from Google to Zoho, or first migrate the emails from Google to Zoho, and then transfer the domain?)
Thanks!
accessing mails in ZOHO is extremely slow , im planning to migrate it to G suite, and since i have not used the mail ID’s registered with ZOHO i need not worry about my mails to be exported.
Is it required to delete the domain name registered with ZOHO and only after that start using G suite or its ok to directly start using g Suite , i want use the same mail ids .
regards Sidh
Hi, I am trying to do this but I keep receiving an error that the login failed. Please help.
Option 1
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I did this earlier, you should have IMAP connection in outlook/Thunderbird before switching to Gmail server (after migrating your email server – you able to login either one place).
once you have downloaded all your emails from Zoho then you should create your Gmail IMAP then drag all mails to that Box.
Option 2
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In Zoho you can export all your mail which gives your eml format.
once done you can import those files into your GMAIL IMAP account in Outlook/Thunderbird by dragging those files
Cheers