Migrating from hotmail to gmail. I’ve written before about how I like to keep everything in the one place – contacts, IM people, and email. Up until now I have been using various ways of checking my various email accounts – outlook, windows live mail desktop and thunderbird to name but a few. The problem with that Is that you end up being tied to one machine to check all your email. you have to open the mail client to get all the mail from all your accounts, or you have to spend half an hour logging into all the different accounts to check one message on each.
not any more.
I have a hotmail account, which I use for my IM and also for sending out mail to my friends, I have a gmail account for personal use, one for spam things that need an email address to register and one for my band, I also have a couple of yahoo mail acocunts.
you can get all the mail in your gmail inbox. all of it.
the easiest way is to simply forward all your email to the gmail address. so I picked an account to be the ‘master’ logged into the other accounts and setup forwarding. great, now all the email gets sent to one account, apart from the hotmail. for the hotmail you have to setup pop access (which is free)

simply goto gmail settings, hit accounts and add your hotmail pop account there – the details are

pop.live.com
port 995
SSL

then gmail will sook all your email from hotmail.

one problem – all the replies you will have will come from your gmail address.

to fix that, goto settings and accounts again. then you can ‘claim’ email addresses that you own. fill them all in and hit the check box that says ‘always reply to an email from the address it came from’.
done. now if you get an email into your yahoo account it is forwarded to gmail and if you reply to it then it looks to the recipient like it came from your yahoo account.
excellent.

one other thing to do to get  away from hotmail is to get your contacts – goto contacts then export them as a csv.
when in gmail goto contacts and hit import. thats it. all your contacts are now in gmail.

a handy thing that I did was to setup filters that attach labels to incoming email – just hit create filter, then in the to: field type in the email address of your account, eg name@hotmail.com then goto the next step, tick ‘create filter’ then create a new filter with name@hotmail.com in it – that way you mark all the incoming mail with a label that tells you what account its from, and you get a list of your labels at the side, so you can still check email by the account its on =)

now if there was a way to get my msn messenger to woirk in google talk I could have all my stuff with me on the move…