Apple to Linux Journal: Moving email from iCloud to my own domains

A mistake I made over 10+ years ago was depending on Apple for my email. It was easy, it was convenient. I'd done the same with Gmail before that. As of 2 weeks ago my email, according to Settings for iCloud showed that I was using around 5GB of storage. In my migration process the past two weeks I first moved all my Photos then my files to my own local network cloud. I was saving email for last. It's actually been fairly easy to do using a method that I suspect works pretty well across many services.

The key is IMAP which most email providers use as a default these days. Here's what I did. I'd already had two email accounts for my two domains set-up, I just wasn't using them for much. Both of those accounts are set-up on the Linux Mac in Thunderbird.

One consideration is data storage limits on email. You'll want to know if you have any and what they are. At the moment both of my email accounts are provided by my web hosting service and are not limited. If that changes I'll look into a dedicated email provider, probably Runbox.

I've got those two accounts as well as my iCloud account set-up in the default Apple Mail app on the iPad and Mac. The transfer is very simple. One of my accounts beardystarstuff.net is primarily for my personal website, mostly blog posts and personal email. The other, beardyguycreative.com is for my freelance work. My iCloud email was mostly just a mix of personal and freelance related email. That's my own problem to sort out. I winged it a bit.

Most of my sent email (2GB) is client related so I just moved that to the Sent mail of beardyguycreative.

I used Thunderbird on the LinuxMac to creat a "iCloud archive" folder on the beardystarstuff account and almost all of the mail went in there. A couple other smaller folders on the beardyguycreative account. After a moment those folders appeared in the Mail app on the iPad.

Initially I was working from the ipad and selected around 200 emails in the iCloud sent folder, then just drag and drop those over to the Sent in the beardyguycreative email account. Done. Selecting more than 200 at a time would sometimes cause Mail to become unresponsive on the iPad so I switched to doing it on the Mac and it was much better with much larger selections with a better indicator of the messages being moved over.

Repeat for each folder in iCloud, dragging to the folders in the two domain accounts. Looking over at the LinuxMac, I could see the email being downloaded into the appropriate folders and accounts. Done.

With this last task done my iCloud account is now down to around 1.9 GB of data so I'll cancel my 50GB iCloud plan at the end of this month. For now I'll just move any important emails that show up in the iCloud account. Going forward, the only money I'll contribute to Apple's bottom line is the occasional month of AppleTV+. I long ago stopped using email in my Google/Gmail account with the exception of a notifications for few online google forms I use. I don't even look at it anymore.

I expect to keep accounts at both Google and Apple but going forward I plan to slowly pull any last bits that are tied into those companies and I'll never use either for important email.

I don't have comments but I love email or you can find me on Mastodon.

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