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How to easily move from Hotmail to Gmail using POP3

// May 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

I finally decided to open myself a Gmail account, I have used hotmail for years so had a lot of old mail I didn’t want to loose. Fortunately Hotmail have recently allowed POP3 access for all accounts, though they don’t go out of the way to promote it.

POP3 is great as it allows you an easy way to both import your email from hotmail, and also allow Gmail to keep checking and recieving your email from hotmail so you don’t miss anything.

Here are the steps of how to do it.

Firstly you need to open up a gmail account. Once you have your account up and running go to settings

Under Accounts and Import select add POP3 Account

A popup window will show, enter your hotmail email address

Googlemail should realise you have entered a hotmail account and know the pop settings (if not try the pop setting below.

Enter your password, if you want to import all your mail make sure leave a copy of the retrieved mail on the server is unchecked

Click Add account

Google mail will ask if you want to be able to send email via your hotmail account i.e. send email from gmail but make it appear to the recipient that is has come from your hotmail address (it will go via hotmail’s servers). If you do click to say so and an email will be sent to your hotmail to verify you are the owner.

You can wait and enter the code on the email in the below window, or simply click the link in the email. Beware the email will likely end up in your hotmail Junk folder.

You will then have the option in Google Mail to send email from either account

Once setup is complete Google mail will then ‘check’ your hotmail account and download all the mail in your inbox. Once this is complete your hotmail inbox should be empty and your Gmail inbox should show all the mail.

Google mail will routinely check your hotmail for new mesages. Remember it will not download ‘junk’ email from hotmail, so it is a good idea to check your hotmail every so often just to ensure nothing you want is stuck in your junk folder.

If you have your hotmail organised into folders, Google mail won’t automatically download this mail. However in hotmail if you move the mail from the folder into your inbox, and force gmail to check your hotmail (under settings/accounts and import) Gmail can also download this mail.

Note it maybe easier to organise the email from your hotmail inbox first, then move your hotmail folder by folder, as it will be easy to label the ‘new’ mail in the gmail inbox with a label simular to the folder you had in hotmail.

Google mail works on the basis of labels rather than folders (see the gmail help for more on that), it is very easy to fillter your mail and add rules to label mail

You will also likely have a lot of email in your inbox that you want to ‘Mark as read’

Gmail works on the basis of archiving email rather than deleting it, so if you want to remove items from your inbox simply archive them, that way they will still be there if you need to search for them (with googles excellent search) if you ever need it.