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Posted on June 1st, 2009 by Stuart Turton
Switching from Hotmail to Gmail
Last week I decided to take the plunge and switch from Hotmail to Gmail. I’ve been flirting with the idea for a while, tempted by the never-ending upgrades and conversation-view email layout. The thing that had always held me back was that I’ve been a Hotmail user for over ten years. There were a lot of emails in that account that I didn’t want to lose, so I procrastinated. Which was daft, because switching is incredibly easy and you don’t have to lose a thing. It goes a bit like this.
Sign up for you Gmail account, click on “settings”, and head to the “accounts” tab. There’s a section entitled “Get mail from other accounts” and you’ll want to click “Add a mail account you own”. Where you’ll be presented with the following lovely box.
In the “Username” type in your Hotmail email address. In the “Password ” box, your Hotmail password. In the “POP3 Server” box enter “pop3.live.com” without the quotation marks. Then set the Port to 995. You’ll also want to click “Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail.” Then save the changes.
That’s it. Kick up your feet and wait for the emails to start trickling in. This bit can take a few hours depending on how much info gets pulled across, whereas sifting through all that mail and labelling it can take days, unless you select it all and press archive. My preferred option.
And just as a footnote, guess how much space my twelve years of emails took up in my new inbox. 38MB. Excellent, only 7,300MB left to go then.
8 Responses to “ Switching from Hotmail to Gmail ”
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June 1st, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Just to add my own experience of porting my Hotmail account to Gmail, I found there was no section entitled “Get mail from other accounts” in my Gmail account settings.
There was, however, a “Check mail using POP3″ section which contained an “Add POP3 e-mail account” button. Once I’d clicked on this, and entered my hotmail address as the one I wanted to check, the screen shown in the blog entry above came up. But the port number and POP3 server were already entered, and correct.
From there on, everything went according to the blog post, and my e-mails were imported from Hotmail. I should also note that there was a “Import mail and contacts” section in Gmail’s account settings, but this wouldn’t work for me.
June 1st, 2009 at 5:35 pm
I’ve just checked another of my Gmail accounts and the process is exactly as described in the blog entry. However, it seems my other Gmail account has been upgraded, and in this case, the process described in my last comment applies.
June 2nd, 2009 at 9:35 am
Anyone else noted that if you search for Hotmail in Google invariably there is always a story about how great switching over to Gmail is about two lines down?
I did and switched over and the importing process doesnt really work for me. It got up to around January this year and gave up. Also try getting some technical support from google. I couldnt find it anywhere. Having said that its MUCH better than hotmail in so many ways and I will slowly be transferring everything over and consigning hotmail to the same bin as internet explorer.
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Google also supports this through Google Apps so you can run the gmail interface on your own domain and import all your legacy emails. Perfect.
June 6th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
I switched from hotmail to gmail years ago and never looked back my reasons for doing so:
1. Gmail intergrates easy with the iphone (with hotmail you need a seperate application)
2. You can intergrate your own domain address via gmail –
3. Loads faster
4. Easier to navigate
5. Setup via outlook is much easier! (Don’t undersatnd why a google to microsoft setup is easier then a microsoft to microsoft…!!!)
June 9th, 2009 at 9:01 am
I was in the process of doing this. I am happy and I will try immediatly. Thanks
July 12th, 2009 at 6:22 am
[...] Hotmail – still ranks higher in the UK. A recent tool released by Google which makes it easier totransfer years and years of Hotmail emails to Gmail won’t make things easier for Microsoft’s online side, [...]
December 12th, 2011 at 10:07 am
could not logon to my email in hot