I received a request from a client to migrate several years of Pegasus emails to Google Gmail. Pegasus does not have any kind of export mail option so it was a real challenge. One option is to simply forward all the emails from Pegasus to Gmail but that would screw up all the sender fields. Forwarding may not always include attachments in the proper format and it adds some text to the original email with a forward header. There are some commercial applications like Transend Migrator that will do the conversion but I knew that had to be a free way to do it. After searching extensively on the web and getting a headache from looking at web pages which haven’t been updated since 1997, I finally came upon a solution that would be easy and painless.

The solution is to use IMAP as the pipeline to transfer all the old emails. Both Pegasus and Gmail support IMAP. In fact, most popular email applications support IMAP so it’s possible to use IMAP to migrate to and from any email applications that support it.

Here are the steps required to migrate Pegasus Mail to Gmail:

  1. Sign up for a Gmail account or a Google App Gmail Account. They are different so consider your needs before choosing one over the other. (Note that if you choose Google App Gmail, you have to put in username@yourdomain instead of username when prompted in the relevant fields.
  2. Enable Gmail for IMAP
  3. Configure Pegasus Mail for IMAP
  4. Once you have connected Pegasus Mail to Gmail, you will see a new directory tree in the left panel of Pegasus Mail showing the folder structure of Gmail. You may need to go to Tools-IMAP Profiles and hit connect before it shows up.
  5. Create the appropriate folders for receiving the old emails.
  6. Select the emails you want to migrate from the old Pegasus Mail folders and click COPY. Depending on how fast your upload speed is and how many emails you are uploaded, you may want to do this in steps. Obviously, moving hundreds of megabyte of data will take a lot of time. It’s a good idea to go through the old emails and delete any SPAM or filter out any emails with very large attachments.
  7. Point to the new Gmail folder and hit OPEN. At this point, your emails will be copied to Gmail with all the attachments and will retain the proper headers. Unfortunately, the date of the email when viewed as a table will be the date of import but if you open the email, it will show the original date. This should pose no problem as Gmail has very good search capabilities.
  8. Repeat this process for all the old folders.

Gmail currently supports the following clients so you can connect those clients and move the emails there if that is your final destination.

One Response to “Migrating Pegasus Mail to Google Gmail Using IMAP”

  1. Ace Telephone Says:
    November 18th, 2008 at 6:06 pm

    We broadbanded with *Q.com. They promised they supported Pegasus. Eventually, they admitted they did not and basically told me to go fuck myself. Anyone who trusts Q.com deserves to feel ripped off, to enjoy the sensation of being utterly f***up.

    I can send mail thru gmail; I can receive thru mindspring. But Pegasus does not you let do both easily.

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