If your company has years of email in Gmail or on another server and you're thinking about moving to Duobox, this is for you: how each person brings their old mail into their new inbox, what comes over and what doesn't.
Why it mattered
Moving email is scary for one reason only: everything that's already over there. A company won't switch its domain's MX if its history —customers, invoices, threads from three years ago— stays behind in the old account. Without this, the only way to try Duobox was a side domain, which is nobody's main email.
What comes over
- Folders, with their hierarchy. Inbox, Sent and Drafts go to the usual ones; the rest are created with their names and show up as labels in the webmail.
- Read, starred and answered state, every message with its original date.
- In Gmail, labels are folders. We walk All Mail and each message comes in once, with all its labels. One with no labels, which in Gmail means archived, goes to Archive.
We don't bring Spam or Trash. Or contacts and calendar: Duobox is email.
How you connect
From Settings → Import in the webmail —or from the domain's Import tab in the hub, if you signed in with your email address—, pick where from:
- Gmail, with an app password: you create it in your Google account and paste it. It isn't your usual password, and you can revoke it whenever you want.
- Any IMAP server: Yahoo, iCloud, Zoho or your hosting's, with username and password.
- Outlook and Microsoft 365, coming soon.
The password is stored encrypted while the import runs and deleted when it ends.
Import again
It's one pass and it ends: nothing keeps syncing in the background. If mail kept arriving over there in the meantime, click Import again and only what's missing comes over. Every imported message is remembered by its Message-ID, so cancelling, starting over or importing twice never duplicates anything.
If the mail over there doesn't fit in the space your inbox has left, the import pauses before copying, and resumes when there's room.
Who imports
Each person brings their own mail, into their own inbox. Nobody imports for someone else, not even whoever runs the company: that would mean getting into another person's old account. Shared inboxes, like sales@, can't be imported into, because that would mix one person's history with everyone's.
Imported mail doesn't trigger forwards or filters: it comes in as mail that was already there, not as mail arriving.
What you need to do
Open the webmail, go to Settings → Import and connect your account. The bar shows the progress, and you can close the tab: it keeps going on its own.