Gmail is one of the most widely used email service and one that has one of the best websites for both basic and business users. Now: we are talking about Google and therefore the debate on privacy is quite present. There are those who specifically decide to avoid Gmail and look for more private messaging solutions.
One of those emails is from Apple, hosted on iCloud and recently released some really useful features like being able to hide our address or traffic with Private Relay. So if you propose forward all your emails from Gmail to iCloud, I will explain how you can do it.
From Gmail to Mail in a few steps
First of all, make sure know your Gmail access password and your Apple ID password. Keep in mind that both services work with two-factor authentication, so you’ll also need to have your iPhone with the Gmail app installed if you’ve enabled this extra security (disclose: you should).
With that said, we’re going to head to a Google website called Takeout, from where you can download your Gmail emails. To do this, you need to find a section called “Mail”, where you can choose to download all messages or only those from certain mailboxes / labels of the service:
If you press the button “All messaging data has been included”, you can choose to download all emails or only those from certain mailboxes. Once done, go back to the top of the page and click on “Uncheck all”, otherwise you will download the data and preferences of all Google services. Now go back to ‘Mail’, select the section so that only this one is downloaded and click on the ‘Next step’ button:
Here you must select ‘Export once’ and the file format .ZIP so that you can properly handle the file on your Mac. If there are a lot of emails, you can also choose the maximum amount of compressed file you can download.
Finally, click on “Create Export” and Google will start generating your compressed file with the Gmail emails you have chosen to download. According to the number of emails it may take minutes, hours or even days. Be patient. You can come back to the same Google Takeout website to locate the downloadable file, although you will also receive a notice in Gmail notifying you of this:
When you have the download available, click ‘Download’ and your Mac will download the mail file in ZIP compressed .MBOX format (it may ask you for your Google account password again for security reasons). All that remains is to import this .MBOX file into Apple’s Mail application..
To do this, open Mail and go to the ‘File’> ‘Import mailboxes’ menu:
In the dialog that will appear, select ‘MBOX format files‘and click on’ Continue ‘:
Mail will ask you to select the .MBOX file you downloaded from Google Takeout and then press “Select”. After a while (it can be more or less depending on the number of emails to import), Mail will tell you that you left the imported emails in the ‘Imported’ folder and you can close the dialog window:
You can find the emails in the ‘Imported’ folder, in the “On my Mac” section:
Ready, you’ve already imported Gmail emails into Mail. You can do this to organize these emails in this program’s folders, or for archival purposes to clear Gmail and leave space in your cloud. The process has several steps, but it is not too complicated.
