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.