How to Move Your Gmail Data to Another Account

Backup & migration

Gmail Exporter Guide

Switching Gmail accounts — to a personal address, a new domain, or simply a fresh start — feels daunting because so much lives in the old inbox. The good news is that a clean migration is mostly three jobs: bring the old mail over, redirect future mail, and carry your contacts. Do them in the right order with a backup in hand, and you can switch without dropping a single conversation. This playbook walks through each step.

Before you start: make a portable backup

Migrations occasionally stall — an import times out, an account gets closed sooner than expected. The cheap insurance is a backup you control before you change anything:

• Export your contacts to a CSV. A spreadsheet of everyone you have emailed is small, portable, and re-importable anywhere.
• Consider a Takeout archive of the old mail for completeness — see backing up your entire Gmail inbox.

With that safety net in place, the migration itself carries far less risk.

Step 1: Import old mail and contacts into the new account

Gmail can pull your old account's mail and contacts across for you:

1. Sign in to the new account.
2. Open Settings → See all settings → Accounts and Import.
3. Under Import mail and contacts, click Import and enter your old address.
4. Follow the prompts to authorize, then choose to import contacts, existing mail, and new mail for a limited window.

Google copies your messages over (via POP) and brings your saved contacts along. It can take a day or two to finish for a large account, and it imports a snapshot plus a short tail of new mail — which is why forwarding in the next step matters.

Step 2: Forward future mail so nothing is missed

Import handles the past; forwarding handles the future. Set the old account to push new arrivals to the new one:

1. In the old account, open Settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
2. Click Add a forwarding address, enter the new address, and confirm the verification email.
3. Choose to forward incoming mail, and decide whether to keep, archive or delete the Gmail copy.

Now anything sent to the old address lands in the new inbox while you update contacts, sign-ins and accounts to the new email at your own pace.

Step 3: Carry your contacts cleanly

The import brings saved contacts, but two gaps remain: people you emailed but never formally saved, and the chance to clean the list as you move it. A CSV export closes both:

1. Install Gmail Exporter in Chrome.
2. Open the old account's inbox or key labels, remove duplicates, and export to CSV.
3. In the new account, go to Google Contacts → Import and upload the CSV.

Because the exporter reads conversations, it captures everyone you have corresponded with — not just the ones in your address book. It runs locally, so your data is not uploaded along the way. See exporting Gmail contacts to Excel or CSV and building a clean email list from Gmail for shaping the file before import.

The migration checklist at a glance

Don't forget the accounts tied to your old email

Your email address is the key to dozens of other services. As part of the move:

• Update logins wherever you used the old address to sign in.
• Change recovery emails on banks, social accounts and anything security-sensitive.
• Tell key contacts directly so they reach the right inbox.
• Watch the forwarded mail for a few weeks to catch anything still using the old address.

If the old account is being closed for you

Migration is calmer when you control the timeline. If someone else is closing the account — for example a former employer — the priority shifts to grabbing everything fast. See saving your Gmail before leaving a job and, if the account is being deleted entirely, exporting all Gmail before deleting.