Preview Email Transfers Before They Run — Dry Runs and Smarter Filters

Email transfers are one of the most consequential operations in employee offboarding. You're moving someone's entire mailbox — potentially thousands of emails — to another account. Once a transfer starts, you want to be confident about what's going to happen.

Until now, the only way to know how many emails would transfer was to start it and watch the progress bar. If the departing user had 15,000 emails but 8,000 were promotional newsletters, you'd only discover that mid-transfer. The destination inbox gets flooded with noise, and you've wasted time transferring emails nobody will ever read.

We've added two features that fix this: dry run estimates and smarter transfer filters.

Dry Run Estimates

The transfer panel now includes a Dry Run button. Click it before starting a transfer, and MonitorWorkspace samples the source mailbox to project the full impact. You get a three-tier breakdown:

1. Filter Reduction — The total email count in the mailbox, minus emails excluded by your active filters (categories, date range, size limits, excluded labels). This tells you how many emails qualify after basic filtering.

2. Smart Filter Analysis — A sampled breakdown of qualifying emails. MonitorWorkspace reads a sample and projects how many the smart category filter would skip versus transfer, with a skip rate percentage. This catches emails that technically pass your filters but are still noise.

3. Projected Result — The estimated final transfer count, showing exactly how many emails will land in the destination inbox and how many will be skipped.

You can adjust your filters and re-run the estimate as many times as needed before committing to the actual transfer. The estimate is non-destructive — it reads but never moves anything.

When Dry Runs Save You

• Large mailboxes — A user with 20,000 emails might only have 6,000 that matter after filtering. The dry run tells you this upfront so you can set expectations with the receiving user.
• Uncertain filter settings — Not sure whether to skip promotions? Run the estimate with and without the filter to see the difference.
• Executive offboarding — When the stakes are high and someone's asking "how long will this take?", you can give an informed answer.
• Quota concerns — If the destination user is close to their storage limit, the estimate helps you decide whether to apply size filters.

Smarter Filters

Alongside dry runs, we've expanded the transfer filters to give you more control over what actually moves:

Skip CC-Only Emails

Only transfer messages where the departing user was a direct sender or recipient. Emails where they were merely CC'd are often FYI messages that the primary recipients already have. This alone can cut transfer volume by 20-30% for users who were CC'd on team communications.

Category Filtering with Smart Mode

Skip entire Gmail categories — promotions, social media notifications, forums, and updates. These categories contain the bulk of email noise.

Enable smart mode to add nuance: instead of blindly skipping every promotional email, smart mode checks whether the thread has replies. A promotional email that sparked a conversation is probably worth keeping. A newsletter that was never opened is not.

Automated Sender Filtering

Filter out emails from noreply@, mailer-daemon@, and other automated addresses. These are system notifications, delivery receipts, and automated alerts that have no long-term value in someone else's inbox.

Date Range and Size Limits

Only transfer emails within a specific window — useful when you only need the last year of correspondence, not five years of history. Set a maximum email size in megabytes to skip emails bloated with large attachments that would eat into the destination user's storage quota.

Label Exclusions

Pick individual Gmail labels to exclude. If the departing user organized their newsletters under a "Subscriptions" label or had a "Personal" label for non-work emails, you can skip those entirely.

Group Overlap Detection

This one prevents a common problem: duplicate emails. When two users belong to the same Google Group, they both received every email sent to that group. Transferring those emails creates duplicates in the destination inbox.

MonitorWorkspace now checks which Google Groups the source and destination users share. It shows you the overlap and lets you automatically skip emails from shared groups. Exclusive groups — ones only the departing user belonged to — are flagged separately so you can make an informed choice.

Unsubscribe Link Collection

When filters skip promotional emails, MonitorWorkspace can collect the unsubscribe links from those skipped messages. This is useful when the destination user will inherit the departing user's email address and doesn't want to keep receiving their newsletter subscriptions.

Filters and Dry Runs Work Together

Every filter you configure is reflected in the dry run estimate. Toggle a filter on, run the estimate, and see exactly how it changes the projected transfer count. This makes it easy to find the right balance between thorough and lean.

A typical workflow looks like this:

1. Select the source and destination users.
2. Run a dry run with no filters to see the raw email count.
3. Enable category filtering and smart mode. Re-run the estimate.
4. Check the group overlap detection. Enable it if there's significant overlap.
5. Review the projected result. Adjust date ranges or size limits if needed.
6. Start the transfer when you're confident in the scope.

The transfer itself supports pause, resume, and cancel — so you're never locked into a run you can't control. Progress updates show success, skip, and fail counts in real time.

Related: Audit Admin Roles Too

If you're tightening up your Workspace operations, check out our new admin role auditing feature — see who has admin access, catch privilege creep, and clean up stale role assignments.

For a complete walkthrough of the offboarding process beyond email transfers, see our Google Workspace offboarding checklist. And for compliance-focused teams, our guide on exporting Google Chat messages covers the chat side of data preservation.

Getting Started

Dry run estimates and the expanded filters are available now for all paid plans. Free plan users can preview a single transfer estimate to try it out.

Open any user on your dashboard, go to the Transfer panel, configure your filters, and click Dry Run before starting the transfer.

Free for up to 10 users. No credit card required.