The worst thing about switching from one email account to another is that you end up losing all your earlier emails and contact lists. And even if you think of transferring it manually, it’s just too much of a pain to shift all your stuff from one account to the other.
But now, with Gmail you could easily migrate all of your emails and contacts from other email providers like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and others! This transition is made easy since you can now get all your old emails and contacts to your new account without any hassles. I know you could also use the POP3 mail fetching feature and upload all contacts in a CSV file, but this new way is a lot simpler for basic imports.
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.
Google says that switching an email account is like getting out of a relationship. You have so much baggage – years of emails and contacts, memories of past Christmases and Valentine’s Days – so the easier your new email account can make it, the better.
You will find this new feature in all new Gmail accounts. This is being slowly rolled out to all the existing Gmail accounts as well, so if you don’t see the feature enabled yet, be a little patient.
To check if this feature has been activated on your Gmail or not, go to Settings and look for the Accounts and Import tab (formerly just called Accounts).
This migration option, unfortunately, is not available for businesses and schools using Google Apps.
I don’t see this feature enabled yet in my Gmail, however, once it is, it will be so easy to access and move all the data and older contact list from my Yahoo.
(Image credits & Source: Google blog)
5 Comments
It will take some for this feature to roll inot all existing gmail users,presently this feature working for new gmail users only.
Bring all my emails from my other email accounts to this site.
Hi – Does anyone know if the import can be done more then once? Specifically, I imported my contacts, but didn’t want to import the mail from hotmail to gmail until I cleaned up the account. Now that it’s cleaned up, it says the import was already done and won’t allow me to do it. Any ideas? Thanks.
My e-mail account: ############### was unfortunately hacked three four time during lost two months with the result that I had to change my password everytime. When I did this last week the problem was that all the contacts and messages were lost with no one to tell me how I could get them back. Then I tried the import technique of gmail, but it gave me the contacts and messages of only few days. Now I donot know how to get b ack the earlier contacts. Can someone guide me?
Shanker K. Modak
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