Migrate from Google | Owlat Docs

Import your full Gmail history into Owlat over IMAP, and let your AI assistant learn from every imported conversation.

The Migrate from Google wizard moves your existing Gmail mailbox into Owlat: it connects your account, imports your entire history, and — when AI knowledge is enabled — teaches your AI assistant from every imported conversation so it can recall and draft with that context from day one.

It builds on the external mailbox connection (the mail.external flag). Connecting an external mailbox alone only syncs new mail going forward; a migration additionally backfills your old mail.

Feature flags

The wizard needs mail.external. The AI-learning step additionally needs ai.knowledge — without it, your mail is still imported and searchable, the AI just doesn't learn from it. Enable both from Settings → Features.

Start a migration

Open Postbox → Settings → Migrate from Google (/dashboard/postbox/migrate). The wizard has four steps:

Connect — Gmail requires a one-time App Password for IMAP (your normal password won't work). Turn on 2-Step Verification, create an App Password named "Owlat", and paste it in. The wizard tests the connection, encrypts the credential at rest, and starts the import.
Import mail — the mail-sync worker walks every folder's history from newest to oldest, storing each message in your Owlat inbox. Progress is live; you can close the page and it keeps running in the background.
Teach AI — once import finishes, Owlat reads through the imported mail and extracts contact-scoped knowledge (facts, decisions, preferences, relationships) into the knowledge graph. Each message's sender becomes a contact, so what the AI learns about one person never leaks into a reply to another.
Done — a summary of what was imported and learned, with links to your inbox and what your AI now knows.

Already connected your mailbox from Postbox → Settings → External mailbox? The wizard skips the connect step and goes straight to "Start import".

What gets imported

Everything: Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Trash, Spam, and your full archive (Gmail's All Mail). Messages are deduplicated by Message-ID, so a message that appears under several Gmail labels is stored once. The import is idempotent and resumable — if the worker restarts mid-import, it picks up where it left off, and re-running a migration never duplicates messages or knowledge.

Tuning & cancelling

Large mailboxes import in batches. On a small VPS you can lower MAIL_SYNC_BACKFILL_BATCH (default 200); raise it to import faster.
You can cancel an in-progress migration at any time — mail imported so far is kept; the rest of your history simply isn't imported unless you start again.
AI indexing calls your configured LLM provider once per imported message and is paced to stay within budget; cost scales with mailbox size.

Not using Gmail?

The wizard is tuned for Gmail, but any IMAP provider works — connect it from Postbox → Settings → External mailbox and the same backfill + AI-learning runs against it.