Google Apps

Message 4 of 4

Greetings from the Gmail Transition Team!  Your migration to Gmail is scheduled to take place tomorrow, on MIGRATION_DATE. There are some final steps you need to take to be ready for the transition.

In This Email

  • Details on the Transition Process
  • Gmail settings to check before migration
  • Avoiding a “messy” address book
  • Configuring clients like Apple Mail and Outlook
  • Configuring mobile devices
  • Getting Help on Friday!

Transition Process

Email will be copied from Zimbra to Gmail in two steps, because of the volume of email involved.

  • The new URL to get to your email is https://gmail.carleton.edu. 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. See details below. Gmail should not be used to send email until after 5PM.
  • At 5PM on MIGRATION_DATE, your Zimbra account will be locked to prepare for the initial copy to Gmail. As of this time, all new email will be delivered directly to Gmail. You can start to use Gmail after 5PM.
  • Shortly after 5pm, the last 30 days of email, all your calendar appointments, and your address book will begin copying from Zimbra to Gmail. You will see them 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 Friday, 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 Monday, MIGRATION_DATE_PLUS_FOUR. For users with particularly large mailboxes, the copying process could take as long as 8 days to complete. You will get an email from ITS when all your mail has been copied to Gmail.

Gmail Settings

There are several other items that we recommend you look at before your mail starts copying from Zimbra:

  • If you currently have a forward set in Zimbra that sends all your Carleton email to a different account for you to read, you will need to recreate that forward in Gmail if you still want all of your Carleton email to be sent to a different email account. Doing so between 1 and 5PM tomorrow will ensure that all your Carleton email will continue to forward to your personal account without interruption. You can find complete directions on how to set up the forward here. Gmail will send a confirmation message to the account you are forwarding to for confirmation; you will need to follow the directions in that email for the forward to work correctly.
  • Zimbra Tags – The system of “tags” that Zimbra uses to allow you to color-code individual messages doesn’t translate to Gmail neatly. Instead, each individual “tag” is recreated as a Gmail label (roughly equivalent to a Zimbra folder), and every message that had the tag will be given that label as well as the label corresponding to the Zimbra folder they were filed in. This can cause more clutter in your list of labels than you were expecting. You can remove the tag from all tagged messages before you migrate to eliminate the issue, if having those tags become labels will be problematic. This screenflow demonstrates how to find and remove tags.
  • Empty Labels in Gmail – One of the first things that will copy from Zimbra to Gmail is the complete list of all of your folders (they become “labels” in Gmail). However, since the list is copied before most of your mail is copied, a number of those labels will have no messages in them until some time later in the migration process, depending on how old the messages in the Zimbra folders were. Do not delete empty labels in Gmail until your migration is complete.

Avoiding a “messy” Address Book

There are several things to be aware of regarding address books and migration, particularly in regard to mobile clients like iPhones.

  • Zimbra kept a copy of every email address that you sent email to in an address book called Emailed Contacts, which the migration process copies to your Gmail Contacts. For our test groups, this resulted in an unexpected amount of cleanup to get rid of duplicate entries and to reduce the number of entries syncing to phones and tablets. We recommend looking at the contents of the Emailed Contacts address book, moving any entries that you wish to keep to your Contacts, and deleting Emailed Contacts entirely before the migration starts. You can find a short video demonstrating how to maintain your Emailed Contacts here.
  • Several of our early adopters discovered that all of the contacts on their phones had been stored in their Zimbra accounts, and when they deleted their Zimbra accounts from their phones, all their contacts were deleted, as well. For iOS devices (iPhones and iPads), directions for checking where your contacts are being stored and moving them if necessary can be found here. For Android devices, it will vary by device; please contact the ITS Helpdesk if you need assistance.

Configuring Clients (such as Outlook or Apple Mail)

Mobile Devices

If you want to see your email and calendar information on your phone or tablet, you will need to configure it to sync with Gmail. Both iOS and Android devices generally have two options: the built-in apps that came with the device, and Google’s Gmail and Google Calendar apps. We recommend that you use the web client or set up the Gmail and Google Calendar apps during the migration process (because iOS devices may present mail out of date order during the copying process). After the full migration is complete, you can safely set up your phone’s built-in Mail and Calendar apps if you wish.

  • iOS (Apple) Devices: Gmail syncs as an Google account type. Detailed instructions, including screen shots, are available here.
  • Android Devices: Because of the many variations of Android devices on the market, these directions may or may not match your needs exactly. If these instructions don’t work for you, please contact the ITS Helpdesk for additional help.
    • Go to Settings.
    • Tap Accounts
    • Tap Add Accounts
    • Tap Google
    • Enter your email address, and tap Next.
    • The Carleton login screen will load. Enter your username and password.
    • Select which things you want to have sync to your phone.

Getting Help on Friday!

On Friday, June 10th, we will have extra staff available via the ITS Helpdesk to answer questions and troubleshoot problems. In addition, there will be training classes taught in CMC110 at 8:30AM and 11AM. Over the weekend, we will also be monitoring messages sent to helpdesk@carleton.edu.