Many students overlook their student account midway through their graduation. Most universities deactivate your account after you graduate. Therefore, before your account deactivates, move your important emails to your personal Gmail account. Here, I am going to explain ways to migrate school email to Gmail.

Table of Contents
  1. Advantages of Moving Your School Emails to Gmail
  2. Points to Remember Before Transferring School Mailbox
  3. Use Google Official Tool to Move School Emails to Gmail
  4. Issues with Using the Manual Approach
  5. How to Transfer School Emails to Gmail with IMAP?
  6. Working Guide of Professional Software
  7. Conclusion

Google Workspace for Education is very popular among educational institutions. So moving your school email account to a personal Gmail account is easier. As both accounts support IMAP servers.

Advantages of Moving Your School Emails to Gmail

The major reason is to transfer your mailbox before the end of your course. You will not be able to access your account due to the deactivation. For other reasons that I have mentioned below.

  • Schools and universities issue email accounts to students with an expiration date. These are deactivated a few months after graduation. So, make sure you transfer your data to your Gmail account before the account is deactivated.
  • Many valuable messages are accumulated over all your school years. Like networking contacts, professors’ recommendations, job applications, internship offers, certificates, and course completion records. Move them to your account to prevent this data from disappearing.
  • Some students use their school email to sign up for job boards, streaming services, and professional portfolios. If the account shuts down, you may lose access to these platforms. So, moving your emails allows you to update your login credentials.
  • Choosing to move your emails to Gmail account can be a student’s personal preference.

Points to Remember Before Transferring School Mailbox

  • Many times institutions disable the official Google transfer tool or block external email fetching for security. Test it before the migration so that you have time to request support to enable it.
  • Make a list of all the emails that you want to transfer. So that at the time of migration, there would be no hassle or disruptions.
    Check that your Gmail account has enough storage to move your school mailbox without causing any issues. For this, you can remove any unwanted emails, clear the trash, etc.
  • Make sure you have a proper internet connection so that you can complete the migration smoothly.

Use Google Official Tool to Move School Emails to Gmail

Google has a built-in Transfer Your Content tool that is created for Google Workspace for Education accounts. This tool can easily copy your emails and Google Drive files into your personal Gmail account. Here’s how you can do it.

  1. Log out of your personal Google account and sign in to your school-issued Google account.
  2. Go to the Google Takeout Transfer page.
  3. Add your personal Gmail email address where you want to send your data. Then, press Send Code.
  4. In a separate tab, log in to your personal Gmail and find the email that says verify your account. Open the email and click Get confirmation code.
  5. Copy this code and paste it to the Google Takeout Transfer page. Press Verify.
  6. Switch on the Gmail toggle, then click the Start Transfer button.

The migration runs in the background, and it may take from a few hours to a few days depending on how much data you have. Once it completes the transfer, it will send an email notification to your personal inbox. With this, you can easily get your school emails to personal Gmail. However, your institution may block Google Takeout Transfer from transferring your emails. Not only that, but it also has some limitations.

Issues with using the Manual Approach

  • Your personal Gmail account has limited capacity, whereas your school account has a large storage space. So, if your school data exceeds the available space in your personal account. Your transfer will fail.
  • Also, it entirely relies on institutional permission. If your school disables the tool, you will not be able to move your messages.
  • This method transfers entire emails. It does not allow you to transfer specific emails.

So, using this method is not a perfect option to move your emails. Especially when they disable this service. However, you can directly transfer your emails if the IMAP server is enabled. If your school has enabled the IMAP protocol, then you can use this specialized software.

How to Transfer School Emails to Gmail with IMAP?

When your institution enables IMAP access. Then, you can use SysTools IMAP Migration Tool to quickly transfer all your mailboxes without using Google’s native tool. This software directly moves your Google Education emails to your personal account while preserving your original messages. To know how this works, follow the steps below.

Working Guide of Professional Software

  1. After installing the software, click IMAP as both the source and destination tab.
    imap as source & destination
  2. You can apply a Date Filter to set a date range and move emails within the selected date periods.
    apply date filter
  3. Select Other as the source and add your school IMAP server. Make sure you validate your permissions.
    add school email server
  4. Choose Gmail as the destination and validate your account.
    provide gmail server
  5. Add your source ID and destination ID files in the Import Users option.
    add user accounts
  6. Make sure you validate both your IDs, then click Start Migration.
    start migration

Conclusion

To be able to transfer your school emails to Gmail, you need to get proper permission for that. There is a native tool, Google Takeout Transfer, that allows you to move Google Workspace for Education account to your personal Gmail account. But some institutions block this feature. However, if they allow IMAP access, then you can use the professional tool to move your important emails without any issues.