Moving mail into Zimbra from another mailbox

How to bring the contents of an old mailbox into your Zimbra account.

Zimbra can connect to your old mailbox and pull its messages in for you. You then move them into your own folders and disconnect the old account, which leaves everything on the Zimbra server where every device can reach it.

This replaces the PST Import Wizard, which is no longer the supported route.

Connect the old mailbox

1. In Zimbra webmail, go to Preferences, then Accounts, then Add External Account.
2. Enter the address of the old mailbox and give the account a name so you can recognise it.
3. Choose whether it is POP3 or IMAP. Your old provider will tell you which, and IMAP is the better choice when both are offered, because it sees all your folders rather than the inbox alone.
4. Enter the username, the mail server address, and the password for the old account.
5. Save.

Zimbra collects the messages into their own set of folders, separate from your existing mail, and they appear in webmail once collection finishes. A large mailbox takes a while.

Move the mail into your own folders

The collected folders are still tied to the external account, so the migration is not finished until the messages sit in your normal folder structure.

1. Open a collected folder in webmail and select all of its messages.
2. Move them into the folder you want them in.
3. Repeat for each collected folder.

Once everything has been moved, remove the external account from Preferences, then Accounts. The mail stays where you put it.

Keeping the other account open instead

The same feature also works without disconnecting at the end. Leave the external account in place and Zimbra keeps collecting from it. You then read both mailboxes in one window while the old address stays live. That suits a handover period rather than a clean move.

Two things are worth knowing before you rely on it. Collected mail is not scanned for spam or viruses. Our filtering protects mail delivered to your Zimbra mailbox, and this has not come that route. Collection is also not instant, so check how often your account is set to collect before trusting it for anything time critical.

If you are keeping the old address for good, forwarding beats collecting. Ask whoever hosts it to forward new mail to your Zimbra address, and it then arrives the normal way and is filtered like everything else.

Do not drag and drop from Outlook

Dragging items from an old profile or PST file into Zimbra through Outlook, or using Outlook's own import tool, loses data quietly. Corrupt or missing items are skipped, and they often still appear in Outlook afterwards, so nobody notices until new mail has arrived and a clean migration is no longer possible.