Importing Yahoo Mail into Gmail With Original Dates

With Yahoo being sold off in chunks to Verizon, I finally decided it was time to migrate my decade worth of Yahoo email over to Gmail.

Although Gmail offers an easy “Import mail and contacts” link from the “Settings > Accounts and Import” tab, this is not what you want to do (this is what I tried first). All your email will transfer over, but it won’t have the proper sender email address or date.

Instead, choose “Add a mail account” under the “Settings > Accounts and Import” tab.

In the pop-up, enter your Yahoo email address.

Then choose “Import emails from my other account (POP3)”.

Then select how you’d like the import to happen:

If you get this notice after submitting:

“Server denied POP3 access for the given username and password. POP access is limited to Yahoo! Mail Plus subscribers. Please contact Yahoo! Mail’s support team for more information.”

It’s wrong. Yahoo does allow POP access for all accounts.

Log into your Yahoo account, and go to “Settings > Account Info” (look for the gear icon in upper right of Yahoo Mail screen).

Then go the “Account Security” tab, and turn the Allow apps that use less secure sign in” setting on.

Once that’s done, you can go back and complete the account addition with Gmail.

If you have a decade worth of emails, it may take a few hours to complete- but all the sender and date data will be correct.

About Devin

I am a developer based in Austin, Texas. I run a little theme shop called DevPress and help manage a WooCommerce shop with Universal Yums. Find me on twitter @devinsays.

4 Responses

  1. Susan

    All my yahoo emails have already disappeared…. I had been saving emails as far back as 1998. WTF… Is there anything that I can do?

  2. Charles Ball

    I made the same mistake you did and it imported all my emails from Yahoo into Google with today’s date attached. How did you undo it?

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