Migrate IMAP contacts to Gsuite
Hello Experts,
I'm fairly sure there is no batch solution for this, but I wanted to run it by everyone here before quoting my client. Currently looking at an email migration from a hosted IMAP server to Gsuite. I have tested the native Google migration tool and it performs well for mailbox data, but it does not capture any contacts. I'm guessing this is due to the contacts being stored locally in Outlook and I just want to make sure I'm not missing something obvious. Other than manually logging into each machine post-migration and moving contacts over myself or providing end-users with instructions to move contacts themselves (HA yea right!) do I have any other option?
I'm fairly sure there is no batch solution for this, but I wanted to run it by everyone here before quoting my client. Currently looking at an email migration from a hosted IMAP server to Gsuite. I have tested the native Google migration tool and it performs well for mailbox data, but it does not capture any contacts. I'm guessing this is due to the contacts being stored locally in Outlook and I just want to make sure I'm not missing something obvious. Other than manually logging into each machine post-migration and moving contacts over myself or providing end-users with instructions to move contacts themselves (HA yea right!) do I have any other option?
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The approach I would take is to connect a local mail client (Thunderbird ?? or the like) to the IMAP server. and download all the mail. This would create a text file on the local machine of all the mail. A sort or scrape of that file could gather all the "From:" lines. Group the from addresses and any group with more the n entries would be considered to be a possible contact. (SQL inport, followed by a group by???)
If I had a contacts list already maintained, I don't think I'd thank you for replacing it with one formed by scraping addresses from emails 😭
However, if you were starting from scratch, then that could be an option.
Alan.
However, if you were starting from scratch, then that could be an option.
Alan.
IMAP has no concept of contacts.
Any contacts live inside an email client or some other type of data server, so best migration method will be to import a .csv file as they both mentioned.