How to transfer emails from one account to another

How do I transfer emails from one account to another?

With a mail app that can hold two accounts at once. Nearly every provider lets mail apps in, so this works whether you're leaving Gmail, Yahoo, AOL or an internet provider's address. Five steps, done on a computer.

The exact settings for each provider are in our guides to exporting Gmail, downloading Yahoo mail, saving AOL mail and moving Comcast email.

What about Gmail's "Check mail from other accounts"?

For years, Gmail could keep pulling new mail from another address into your Gmail inbox. Google is removing it, together with Gmailify, which added Gmail's spam filtering to an outside account. According to Google, new users lose them after the first quarter of 2026, and people already using them can keep them until January 2027. Mail that was already brought in stays in Gmail.

What still works is the one-time copy. In Gmail on a computer, open Settings, See all settings, Accounts and import, then Import mail and contacts. Google says it brings in the messages but not your folders or labels, and keeps forwarding new mail from the old address for 30 days. After that, Google suggests turning on forwarding at the old provider instead.

So if you want your folders, or you're moving somewhere other than Gmail, the mail app route above is the one to use.

Moving the whole household, one person at a time

In most families, everyone's mail lives somewhere different. One parent has Gmail, the other a Yahoo address from college, a grandparent has had the same AOL address since the 1990s. Moving everyone on the same weekend sounds efficient and usually ends with someone missing a school email.

One person at a time works better:

• Start with whoever is most comfortable with email. They find the surprises, and help the next person.
• Copy their mail with the five steps above, on the family computer.
• Turn on forwarding at the old address if the provider offers it, so nothing new gets stuck there.
• Update the senders that matter: bank, doctor, school, pharmacy. The rest can wait until their mail turns up at the old address.
• Check the old address once a week for a few months. When nothing new arrives, that person is done, and the next one starts.

Leave the oldest archive for last. A grandparent's twenty years of mail is the slowest to copy and the one you most want to get right.

How much mail fits

Check the size of the old mailbox before you start. If the family is moving to its own domain with us, each mailbox holds 5 GB. With a very large archive, bring the recent years across and keep a downloaded copy of the rest on the computer.

Where should everyone move to?

If the reason for moving is an address someone else controls, the answer is an address on the family's own domain, like anna@smiths.family. It stays the same whichever email company you use next, so this is the last time anyone has to do the steps above. How to create a custom email address walks through the options, and the comparison puts the providers side by side.