Migration from Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail to Gmail Made Easy

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 14 May 2009

Migrating from one email account to another, like for example from your Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail account to some other email client may prove to be a tricky task. You will have to move all your old messages and that address book that took you ages to build up from one email client to another, and this is causing you a lot of grief and anxiety. Well, migrating from any email client to Gmail needs not be frustrating; in fact, the Gmail development team touts the fact that it is quite an easy task to accomplish.

“Gmail now migrates email and contacts from other email providers, including Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL, and many more. It's much easier to make the transition now that you can bring along all your old email and contacts. You can even have your messages forwarded from your old account for 30 days, giving you time to take Gmail for a test drive while you make up your mind,” explains Gmail Engineer, Chad Parry.

If you set up a brand new Gmail account right now (just click here and be on your way to enjoy a sleuth of incredibly useful features) the option to migrate from your old email account to Gmail is enabled by default. Existing Gmail users can use this tool to import their emails and contacts from other email accounts, just that the feature is being rolled out gradually. This means it might take some time until it reaches each and every Gmail user, so just be patient.

Chad Parry again: “It'll take longer than the few hours or days that most Gmail features take to get out to everyone. You'll know it's on for your account when you see the Accounts and Import tab (formerly just called Accounts) under Settings. Sorry, businesses and schools using Google Apps won't see these new migration options. Everyone can still use POP3 mail fetching and upload your contacts in a CSV file, but this new way is much simpler for basic imports. And we like it when you can access and move your data the way you want — it's been easy to auto-forward all your Gmail messages to any other service, and now it's a little easier to go the other direction too.”


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