Now Easier to Switch From Yahoo!, Hotmail to Gmail
The Gmail team is making it easier for new users to import all of their old contacts and email addresses.
Moving from one service to another, be it Yahoo! Mail to Hotmail or Hotmail to Gmail, is a huge pain in the butt. The Gmail team today announce via the service’s official blog that Gmail can now migrate email and contacts from other email providers, including Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL, as well as a whole bunch of others, like Netscape, Comcast and Verizon. Not only will Gmail's new Import tool bring all your mail and contacts with you, it also gives you the option to have all mail addressed to your old account forwarded to your Gmail.
I sort of wish this option had been available when I made the switch to Gmail. My old Hotmail account is still active because I use it when I’m signing up for forum, sites etc., that I don’t want to receive junk mail from but it would have been nice to move all of the emails I wanted to keep over.
The Gmail team has said that while this option is immediately available for all new accounts, they will be rolling it out to current users so if you, like me, want to move old emails over to your current Gmail account, watch out for the ‘Accounts & Import’ tab under settings. The Gmail staff warns it will be more than a few hours or days before everyone sees it but hey, if you’ve been managing without all your old contacts up until now, what’s a few more weeks?
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Jane McEntegart is a writer, editor, and marketing communications professional with 17 years of experience in the technology industry. She has written about a wide range of technology topics, including smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. Her articles have been published in Tom's Guide, Tom's Hardware, MobileSyrup, and Edge Up.
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gsacks Nice. But it is a few months late for me. I already moved all of my stuff over from Comcast, one folder at a time, so I could keep it all sorted. Really, this wasn't that hard with gmail before. You just had to set up the old account as a pop account and have gmail set to retrieve it. Then go back into the old account and mark everything as new so gmail would pick it up. That didn't import the address book though.Reply
Now, if they would only make it easier to do a full back-up of my gmail to my own PC, I would be a really happy camper. -
jrnyfan I might have to give this a try. Hotmail sucks at forwarding emails to my BB Storm and so I setup a gmail account for all my important emails so that it would go immediately to my phone...msn ftl.Reply -
hellwig Migrate everything to Gmail? If their servers didn't crash regularly we might be able to take them seriously as a webmail host. Unless they get some more stability, I'll just stick with Yahoo.Reply -
3p0ch I'll just be happy to have my old contacts. I have just added them as needed to my gmail.Reply -
FlayerSlayer Sadly, I have Vista. GMail crashes regularly in Firefox, Chrome, or IE7. It's getting to the point that I am tired of even opening my mail because it's just going to kill my browser again.Reply -
doomtomb I've been using gmail for years and it is wonderful. I see other people's inboxes get full of spam. I think the only reason yahoo is still around is because people use it for mail and news. That's often the reason that friends give me. Hotmail is trash and always has been. That's the place you go to for a 5-min email.Reply -
fuser Yahoo still has a much better web interface than gmail. I have both, but I'm keeping yahoo as my primary account.Reply -
frozenlead hellwigMigrate everything to Gmail? If their servers didn't crash regularly we might be able to take them seriously as a webmail host. Unless they get some more stability, I'll just stick with Yahoo.I've never encountered a Gmail crash hindering me. Ever. I've been a gmail user since age...14? I think?Reply -
puddleglum FlayerSlayerSadly, I have Vista. GMail crashes regularly in Firefox, Chrome, or IE7. It's getting to the point that I am tired of even opening my mail because it's just going to kill my browser again.Reply
Hmmm. I wonder if Microsoft is doing this deliberately like they did with Windows running on top of DR-DOS? :O