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import & deduplication of emails
I have two old Gmail accounts:
1) A legacy Google apps account (my main one).
2) A regular Gmail account.
Over the years, I’ve ended up with a confusing email setup because of changes Google made, especially around their free tier. A while back, I downloaded all my photos and deleted them from the free account, only to later find out it wouldn’t be shut down, turning the free tier into google legacy.
Now, I want to move everything from my legacy account to my regular Gmail account. My plan was to use POP/IMAP to transfer the emails. However, my regular Gmail account is currently set to forward its emails to the legacy account, which would mean thousands of duplicates. Also, when Google fetches emails via pop/imap, it puts them all at the top of the inbox instead of storing them chronologically.
I’d love some advice on how to make this transition smoother, or if I’m just overthinking it. I really want to stop the forwarding and use just the regular Gmail account.
Comments
Log in to your Gmail account
Click the gear icon in the top right corner of the page and select “Settings”
Go to the “Filters and Blocked Addresses” tab
Click on “Create a new filter”
In the search bar, enter criteria for the duplicate emails you want to delete, such as the sender’s email address or the subject line.
Click on “Create filter”
In the next screen, select “Delete it” as the action you want to take when an email matching the criteria arrives in your inbox.
Click on “Create filter” to save the changes.
From now on, any email that meets the criteria you specified in the filter will be automatically deleted, keeping your inbox free of duplicates. Keep in mind that this process is irreversible. So be sure to backup Gmail emails, especially your important emails before using filters to delete Gmail duplicates.
mbsync can probably do what you need
Lamiral for sync and thunderbird for filtering duplicates.
There are thousands of emails from the last 14 years or so, how am I know to the sender address for all of these emails & which ones are duplicate to begin with
Thanks for the input, one question though: Lets say an email with subject "Blablabling" is forwarded from gmail account A to gmail account B. Now we import all emails of B into A. In the eyes of these software will the email with the subject "Blablabling" be duplicate albeit there definitely must be differences in email headers bcoz of the forwarding ?
Message-ID etc should remain the same in that case of auto forwarding. Imapsync is the better choice for that
With the Thunderbird duplicates extension, you can select which fields to use for comparison from all to a select few. I guess in your case it would depend on what factors you are including when checking for duplicates.
Hi,
To make the transition smoother, you can disable the forwarding from your regular Gmail to the legacy account first, so no new emails will create duplicates. Then, when transferring the emails using IMAP, you can set up filters or labels to help organize them, which might reduce the clutter in your inbox.
Additionally, you could use a third-party tool like Google Takeout or MailStore Home to back up and migrate emails while keeping their original dates intact.
And, there are tools that can automatically filter and remove duplicate emails and one of them is Duplicate Email Remover for Gmail (Gmail add-on) - This is a Chrome extension designed specifically to remove duplicate emails from Gmail accounts. It scans your inbox and can automatically delete duplicates.