HOW TO RETRIEVE COMPANY EMAILS FROM PERSONAL ACCOUNTS USING BITTITAN.COM AND TRANSFER THEM TO GOOGLE WORKSPACE
EMPLOYEES USING PERSONAL EMAIL PLATFORMS LIKE GMAIL AND YAHOO TO “POP” COMPANY EMAILS
PROBLEM:
Many small businesses have allowed their employees to either use their personal email (such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.) for work or have allowed them to pull in their work email using POP to their personal email – and specifically free Gmail accounts is the worst culprit as Google makes that so easy and it’s a very popular platform.
When companies allow employees to do this, they lose control over their historical emails, sent and received by their employees. Since the employee is POPing the company’s email (i.e. joe@companydomain.com) to their personal Gmail (joe@gmail.com), they have control over who has access to that mailbox and could potentially never give the company back that potentially valuable data, it’s all stuck in their personal Gmail account which the company has no authority to access.
Third party email backup solutions that will backup your business email also have no access to emails in someone’s personal Gmail account so if an employee decides to delete it all, it’s gone forever.
Also since a user is accessing those emails in his personal account, your company internal cybersecurity measures will have no effect on whether his personal account gets hacked and your company email data compromised without you knowing.
In addition to not having access to their account, the other BIG problem is when email is POP’d into someone’s personal Gmail account, it is mixed in into the same Inbox and Sent folder as their personal emails, so it’s all in one bucket making it very hard to distinguish and organize so business emails can be extracted.
Some companies have gone so far as to try and setup free personal Gmail accounts for the business by creating email accounts such as user.at.companyA@gmail.com. However that end user will have the password for that account and if they leave, you have no way of getting into that account – there is no business centralized management of it.
POP and IMAP email protocols are now legacy protocols that really don’t have a place in business environments.
Before getting into how to fix this, the true answer would have been to:
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Never allow employees to POP their business email to their personal cloud email accounts to begin with by either using an email platform that can restrict this and/or making a company policy that clearly delinates this.
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But with many small businesses still using cheap email alternatives from website hosts that only allow POP or IMAP email, these email platforms have NO way of restricting the use of POP so employees could be setting up POP to their Gmail accounts and you have no way of knowing or controlling that.
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Having a proper business grade email server that uses more advanced protocols other than POP and IMAP, such as what Google Workspace and Microsoft Office 365 have. You have the power to disable POP as needed as there is really no need for it anymore.
SOLUTION:
We’ve brought onboard businesses that we’ve upgraded to either Google Workspace or Microsoft Office 365 that have had employees with company email in their personal Gmail accounts. And as long as the employee allows you temporary access to their personal account, you can cleanly migrate JUST the business emails out of the Inbox/Sent/Trash folder, without touching the user’s personal emails.
The key is to use Gmail Tagging to create separate tagged folders that are filtered to the company email address for the Inbox, Sent and Trash and any other respective folder. Once those tagged folders have been created, you can use Bittitan’s cloud email transfer service to migrate over those folders to the company email Inbox, Sent and Deleted Items folder.
INSTRUCTIONS:
- To get your email account ready for migration, login to the employee’s personal Gmail account and then click on Settings (the gear icon) -> See all settings.
- In the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, make sure to enable IMAP. This is needed so that Bittitan can connect to the Gmail account to transfer the business emails.
- You will need to enable 2FA, to do this click on the icon in the top right corner that has your picture or a letter, then click on “Manage your Google Account”.
- On the left-hand side, click on Security.
- Got to “2-Step Verification” and enable this.
- Enter the phone number you want the 2FA to go to.
- You will then need to setup an App Password, to do this, click on 2-Step Verification.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on App Passwords.
- Create your app password and save this.
- This app password will be used as the source credentials in Bittitan for the email account you’re trying to migrate to Google Workspace/Office 365.
- If you’re trying to only migrate certain emails, like maybe just your work emails and not your personal emails, you will need to do the following. Create a label in Gmail, call it what you want, for example “Work”. To do this, click the “+” sign next to Labels, give it a name and click Create.
13. Go to Settings (the gear icon) -> See all settings
- Click on the tab “Filters and Blocked Addresses” -> “Create a new filter”
- In the “Has the words” section put the domain of your company, for example “@protekitsolutions.com” if you’re looking for work emails from Protek IT Solutions and then click Create Filter.
- On the next page, select “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)”, “Apply the label:” (Here put the name of the label you created), and check “Also apply filter to “ ” matching conversations.”
- This will bring all the emails you want migrated into this label.
- In BitTitan, when creating the source email address, don’t forget to use the app password created earlier as the password.
- In the ADVANCED OPTIONS under Filter Folders put ^(?!Work) (or whatever label name you created in step 13 above)
- Under SUPPORT, put FolderMapping=”^Work->Work”.