How to Migrate from Shared Gmail / Outlook to Front (2026)

Connect vs forward: the decision that shapes everything

The single most important choice happens before you touch a setting. In Front, a mailbox becomes a channel one of two ways, and they behave very differently.

Connecting means authenticating the account directly — you sign in with Gmail or Office 365 via OAuth, and Front reads and sends on that account's behalf. This is the path that unlocks history import and a live two-way sync, so a reply sent from Front shows up in the Gmail "Sent" folder and vice versa. Per Front's guide on choosing between a Google Group and a Gmail user account, a connected Gmail user account supports email-history import, two-way sync, and sent-mail sync; a Google Group or distribution list does not — those are forwarding-only.

Forwarding means you leave the mailbox where it is and forward incoming mail into a Front address (an SMTP channel or a group alias). It's simpler and free, but Front only ever sees mail that arrives after you set it up. There is no historical import, no two-way sync, and your sent history stays behind in the old system.

The practical rule: if the shared mailbox is a real Gmail or O365 inbox and you care about keeping its history, connect it directly. If it's a support@ Google Group or a distribution list, you're on the forwarding path whether you like it or not, and you should plan to start Front from a clean slate.

What actually imports when you connect

When you connect a full Gmail or Office 365 inbox as a shared inbox, Front offers a one-time history import. Per Front's article on importing your Gmail/Office 365 inbox email history, the import can pull up to 50,000 messages, brought in newest to oldest, with a progress bar shown at the bottom of the conversation list while it runs. Depending on volume, attachments, and message contents, a large import can take a while — Front notes it can run for many hours before it completes, so it's not an instant switch.

A few behaviours are worth knowing before you flip it on:

• Shared-inbox conversations are auto-archived on import. They land in the Archived tab rather than your live inbox, so you don't wake up to 50,000 "open" conversations. You start clean, with history searchable behind you.
• Read/unread status carries over for individual inboxes — an unread message in Gmail stays unread in Front.
• Office 365 folders become Front tags. Front imports up to 500 folders as tags and preserves their nesting structure. Past 500, you curate which tags show in the sidebar.
• Messages import as conversations, threaded as they were, with sent replies appearing inside the thread rather than a separate Sent view.

The mapping table: what moves vs what you rebuild

Here's the honest ledger. Migrating isn't a one-to-one copy — some things transfer with the connection, and some you set up fresh in Front.

The pattern is clear: conversations and their metadata travel; the automation and boilerplate around them don't. Budget an afternoon to rebuild filters as rules, re-add templates and signatures, and set up assignment logic — that's the real work of the move, not the import itself.

Downtime and cutover: how to switch without dropping mail

A shared-mailbox migration doesn't require a maintenance window the way a database migration would, but it does need sequencing so no email falls between the two systems.

1. Connect the mailbox to Front first, and let the import finish. Because the history import runs in the background and can take hours, start it well before you plan to route your team into Front.
2. Keep the old shared mailbox open in parallel during the import. Front's two-way sync (on a connected account) means replies sent from Front reflect in Gmail/O365, so agents can start working in Front while the back-history is still filling in.
3. Rebuild rules, templates, and signatures while the import runs — this is the part that takes human time.
4. Move your team's daily workflow into Front only once the import completes and routing is set up. For a full walkthrough of the account connection itself, see how to connect Gmail to Front.
5. Update your MX or forwarding last, if you're changing where mail is delivered, so you're not pointing addresses at Front before it's ready to receive them.

Done in that order, the real "downtime" is near zero — the old mailbox keeps working until the moment you decide Front is live.

The data-lock-in caveat worth knowing up front

Before you commit a support operation to Front, it's fair to look at the exit as well as the entrance — because getting out of Front is markedly harder than getting in.

Front's outbound export is Support-gated and lossy. As covered in how to export data from Front, there's no clean self-serve "export everything" button: pulling your full conversation archive out typically means opening a Support request, and the export that comes back is incomplete. Attachments, contacts, templates, and tags generally don't come out via the self-serve tools, and the parts of Front that make it valuable — your rules, shared drafts, and analytics — are proprietary and don't survive to another platform at all. In other words, the canonical copy of your support history increasingly lives inside Front, in Front's shape.

That's not a reason to avoid Front — plenty of teams are very happy there, and every collaborative inbox has some gravity. It's a reason to go in with eyes open: keep the source Gmail/O365 mailbox intact for a while rather than deleting it the day the import finishes, and understand that the automation you build inside Front is an investment you can't easily lift back out. The full Front pricing picture is worth weighing against that lock-in when you choose a plan.

Where an AI layer fits after you land

Migrating to Front upgrades how your team collaborates on email — assignment, comments, shared visibility. What it doesn't change is that every conversation still needs a human to read it and write the answer.

That's the seam an AI agent layer fills. The broader category of AI agents for customer service exists to do the reasoning-heavy part a shared inbox can't. Macha is one such layer, and it works with whichever inbox you land on — it runs on top of Front through the live Macha–Front connector and is not a replacement for Front, your shared inbox, or your team. Once your mail is flowing into Front, Macha's agent reads each conversation, understands intent rather than keywords, and drafts or sends a grounded reply — pulling a real order or account status through a custom tool that turns your existing REST API into something the agent can call. Macha's credits are consumed per AI action, never per resolution, because automation and reasoning genuinely cost differently and it's honest to price them that way. The clean division of labour: Front owns collaboration, and an agent on top owns the part where the conversation actually gets answered.

FAQ

Can I import my full Gmail or Outlook history into Front? Yes, if you connect a full Gmail or Office 365 inbox directly (via OAuth) as a channel. Front runs a one-time history import of up to 50,000 messages, newest to oldest. Google Groups and distribution lists are forwarding-only and import no history at all.

Will my old folders and labels come across? Office 365 folders import as Front tags — up to 500, with nesting preserved. Gmail labels work the same way: they import as Front tags on connection, nested labels included. The one caveat is that this is a one-time import — after it, adding or removing a label in Gmail versus a tag in Front does not sync bidirectionally, so keep your tagging in Front once you have moved.

How long does the migration take, and is there downtime? The import itself runs in the background and can take several hours depending on volume. There's effectively no downtime if you connect Front and let the import finish while the old mailbox stays open in parallel, then move your team over once routing is ready.

What won't transfer from my shared mailbox? Filters, canned responses, signatures, and contacts don't move automatically — you rebuild those as Front rules, templates, and signatures. Google Group history and (for non-connected accounts) sent history stay behind.

Is it hard to get my data back out of Front later? Yes, and it's worth knowing before you commit. Front's export is Support-gated and lossy — attachments, contacts, templates, and tags generally don't come out via self-serve tools, and rules, shared drafts, and analytics don't port to other platforms. Keep your source mailbox intact rather than deleting it right after import.

Landed on Front and want it to actually answer conversations, not just organise them? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Front in minutes.