Khushi Ratra
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An error occurred while saving the comment This is a good suggestion, especially for businesses moving away from Google Workspace. Microsoft already provides a native Google Workspace migration option through Exchange Admin Center, which is a good starting point for standard migrations. It supports batch mailbox migration and helps move email data into Microsoft 365 with centralized management. Contacts and calendars can also be migrated using Microsoft's supported migration process, although they may require additional steps depending on the migration method used.
One thing that's often overlooked is Gmail labels. Since Gmail allows a single message to have multiple labels, those labels can appear as separate folders after migration. Cleaning up unused labels before the move can make the destination mailbox much easier to manage.
For organizations migrating many users or wanting more control, there are third-party options as well. We've used the BitRecover Google Workspace to Office 365 Migration Tool, which supports admin impersonation, bulk mailbox migration via CSV, emails, contacts, calendars, incremental migration, folder hierarchy preservation, detailed migration reports, and modern OAuth authentication.
One feature I found particularly valuable was admin impersonation. Instead of requesting every user's password, the administrator can authorize the migration once and process multiple mailboxes centrally, which significantly reduces effort during large migration projects while maintaining proper security practices.
If you're planning to use Thunderbird, the target format should definitely be MBOX, not PST. Thunderbird doesn't open PST files natively, so converting them first is the cleaner approach.
The manual workaround usually involves Outlook and IMAP, but it's slow for large archives and doesn't help if you're working with multiple PST files or old backups. I've had better results using the BitRecover PST to MBOX Converter. It supports bulk PST to MBOX conversion, works without Outlook, preserves folder hierarchy, attachments, email headers, metadata, and Unicode/ANSI PST files, and even includes a Recovery Mode for damaged PST files.
One tip from experience: if your PST contains multiple mailbox roots, convert them into separate MBOX files instead of combining everything. Thunderbird handles individual mailboxes much better, and it makes future imports and troubleshooting considerably easier.