Gmail1 – Intro and Transition Details

Message 1 of 4

Everyone will receive this email 6-8 weeks prior to their scheduled migration date. 

Greetings from the Gmail Transition Team!  Your migration to Gmail is scheduled to take place on TRANSITION_DATE. This email will give you an overview of the process, including details about how the migration will happen, information about how to make the transition work more smoothly, and details about training and support. All of the information in this email, complete training information, frequently asked questions, and more are available on the email project website.

In This Email

• Welcome
• Details about the transition process
• Information on how much of your email will copy
• Things you can do to make the process go more smoothly
• Information on training and support

Welcome!

This is the first message in a series of four that will walk you through preparing for the migration from Zimbra to Gmail. These messages are long and contain a lot of information; please take the time to read them all the way through. If you wish to read ahead or to refresh your memory about any of the four messages, the complete text of each of them can be found on the project website.

Transition Process

Email will be copied from Zimbra to Gmail in two steps, because of the volume of email involved. The process looks like this:

• Your email address is not changing.
• By 1pm on MIGRATION_DATE, you will be able to log into your Gmail account, which will be empty to start with. If you wish to set a forward or configure your preferences in Gmail, you can do so at this time. Gmail should not be used to send email until after 5PM.
• Between 1PM and 5PM, there are some Gmail settings you may want to set to make the transition smoother. Find details on what those settings are. Details will also be emailed out the day before the migration. We recommend setting aside some time during the afternoon of MIGRATION_DATE to work through those settings.
• At 5PM on MIGRATION_DATE, your Zimbra account will be locked to prepare for the initial copy to Gmail. All new email will be delivered directly to Gmail.
• Shortly after 5pm, the last 30 days of email, all your calendar appointments, and your address book will begin copying from Zimbra to Gmail. It is not instantaneous; you will see messages, appointments, and addresses appear in Gmail in chunks intermittently throughout the evening. Please remember that the contents of the Trash and Junk folders will not be copied.
• The initial copying process will take between one and twelve hours, depending on how much email you have to copy. By 8AM MIGRATION_DATE_PLUS_ONE, this initial copying process will have finished.
• After everyone in your migration group has their last 30 days of email in Gmail, the second copy phase will begin and will bring all the rest of your email from Zimbra to Gmail. For most users, the second copying process will be finished before the start of work on MIGRATION_DATE_PLUS_FOUR. For users with particularly large mailboxes, the copying process could take as long as 8 days to complete.
• When everyone in your migration group has finished copying, you will receive a message from ITS telling you that your copy has finished and detailing any error messages produced from copying your account.

Will it be perfect?

We have found in our testing and from our early adopters that nearly every account has a few messages that do not successfully copy to Gmail. Most of those messages were marketing messages (spam) with pretty severe formatting problems, like multiple “From:” addresses, or messages that contained viruses. The error rate is currently around 0.01%, with the number of errors per account ranging from zero to around 250; most people who had errors had fewer than 20. When all your mail has copied from Zimbra to Gmail, we will send you a report listing any messages that failed to copy, including for each one the sender, the date sent, the subject line, and about 20 lines of text from the message to help you determine if the contents of the message were important. The Helpdesk will be able to help you retrieve any messages you need that fail to copy.

Smoothing the way

The amount of time it takes to copy your email from Zimbra to Gmail depends entirely on how much email you have to copy. Reducing the amount of email you have before MIGRATION_DATE will make your transition faster. The steps we’ll be asking you to take between now and MIGRATION_DATE will concentrate on three areas:

• identifying and cleaning up messages you don’t need
• identifying and cleaning up messages that could cause problems or are prohibited from copying to Gmail
• refamiliarizing yourself with how you currently have some aspects of Zimbra configured so you can recreate them in Gmail (e.g. your signature files, forwards, and rules).

You will receive another email from us four weeks before your migration date with detailed instructions and more information.

Training and Support

We’ve identified several peer experts called SuperHeroes who will help your department through the transition process. They have completed our training program, are well-versed in the migration process, and may have already migrated. They are available to answer questions for you before you transition, as well as to help you figure out how to operate in the new Gmail environment. To find your SuperHero, please look in this document. We’ve also developed and curated training resources  that will include both self-paced web-based training and classroom-style training. On the Friday immediately following your Thursday migration, and again during the week following your migration date there will also be training and open drop-in sessions available for you to attend where you can get individualized help with specific questions.

Finally, if you have questions or concerns throughout this process, please don’t hesitate to contact Austin Robinson-Coolidge (arobinso, x5635) or Julie Anderson (janderso, x6824).