Bringing your data with you — importing from Google, Microsoft, Apple and the rest

Leaving a mailbox behind is easy. Taking the last decade of mail with you — that's where most people stall.

Oneva's import wizard is designed to make this boring. You enter your old email address, pick the account you want it imported into, and hit go. In the background, your messages, calendars, and address books flow across while you start using the new workspace for new mail straight away.

But there's a reality worth naming first, because it shapes everything below. The big cloud providers have spent the last few years making it steadily harder to get your data out. The protocols still technically exist; you just have to jump through a new set of hoops to use them. That's not a security story, or not only. It's drift away from the one thing that made email portable in the first place.

Oneva doesn't do any of that. Your Oneva password works with any standard mail, calendar, or contacts app forever, and when you leave — if you do — we hand you a server dump. That's the deal. But getting into Oneva from one of the big three means briefly living in their world.

Apple iCloud

Apple's requirement is the simplest. Your normal iCloud password won't work — Apple requires an "app-specific password" for outside apps. Generate one at appleid.apple.com (Sign-In and Security → App-Specific Passwords), paste it into the wizard along with your iCloud email, and you're done. Mail, calendars, and contacts all come over.

iCloud is slow compared to the others — Apple throttles aggressively — so budget extra time for large mailboxes. The import runs in the background and handles the rate limits for you.

Microsoft 365 and Outlook

For most Microsoft accounts, the right path is the Connect Microsoft button in the wizard. You approve mail, calendar, and contacts read access, and the import runs through Microsoft's own APIs. No admin involvement needed for most accounts. It's the smoothest flow of the three providers.

The alternative — plain IMAP with a password — has been turned off for Microsoft 365 business tenants since late 2022. For older personal Outlook.com accounts it still works in a limited way (mail only, no calendar or contacts), but for anything newer the Connect Microsoft button is the way through.

Gmail and Google Workspace

Google is where the squeeze is most visible. Since 2022 there's no "less secure apps" toggle and plain-password IMAP is dead for most accounts. What still works is an app password — generate one in your Google account's security settings, 2-Step Verification has to be on first, paste it into our wizard. Your mail imports just fine.

The catch is that Google only allows app-password access to mail, not to calendars or contacts. To bring those along, export your calendar as an .ics file from Google Calendar, and your contacts as a .vcf file from Google Contacts, then import them into Oneva's calendar and contacts apps. It's a couple of extra clicks, not a couple of extra hours.

Everyone else

If you're on a smaller provider — Fastmail, ProtonMail, Zoho, your university, or a hosting company's mail — the import is usually easier than with the big three. Most still support standard IMAP the normal way, often with an app password in their settings. Calendars and contacts ride along automatically when your provider exposes them through the open standards (most do).

The wizard tries to detect your provider from the email address and fill in server details. If it can't, you can enter them manually. Either way, it's the same "enter credentials, hit go" flow.

Practical advice

A few things that make the move smooth:

The DNS change doesn't cut off your import. For custom domains, the onboarding wizard captures your old mail server's IP address before your DNS moves to Oneva. When the import runs later, it connects to that IP directly — so even though your domain now points at us, your old mail is still reachable behind the scenes. You don't need to do anything manual; just pick the right moment to actually run the import (any time after your workspace is active).

Don't worry about size. Oneva runs imports in the background. You can use your Oneva inbox for new mail immediately, and there's a progress bar in the dashboard showing what's transferred so far.

Don't delete the old account right away. Let Oneva run alongside the old provider for a week or two. Spot-check a few folders to make sure everything came across. Then shut down the old account.

What this is really about

The hoops above aren't there because email is inherently hard. They're there because every big provider has made small, individually-reasonable choices about how hard to make it to move your data. None have made it impossible. All have made it harder than it was a decade ago.

The reason Oneva exists is that your data should not require anyone's blessing to move. Once it's in your Oneva workspace, any standard mail, calendar, or contacts app can read it — today, next year, whatever happens. The import wizard is simply how we make that promise usable against vendors who are moving in the opposite direction.

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If you're in the beta, the import wizard is under Import Data in your workspace. Point it at your old provider, hit go, and come back later. If your provider has some specific quirk we haven't covered, drop us a note — we've probably seen it.