Gmail
is increasingly becoming the email provider of choice for many individuals and organizations alike. Google is well aware of that fact and
recently rolled out a new Import Mail & Contacts feature that joins
Gmail settings. I found the new feature in my Gmail account but didn't
see it in a Google Apps account I maintain under a personal domain.
The new import feature is a simple affair. Go to your Gmail settings and open the Accounts and Import tab. Click on Import Mail & Contacts and a new browser window appears. Enter the email address of the email account you want to import into Gmail. Click Continue.
A
point of note about this import process for those of you aliasing a
personal domain and email address to an ISP, Gmail only supports a
limited number of ISPs at the current time with no allowance for
personal domain names. This makes me think that this new feature is
more targeting users who want to decommission web mail accounts from
other services versus ISP accounts.
A new browser window appears prompting you for the password of the email account you are importing into Gmail. Click Continue.
The next browser window presents you with the following options:
- Import Contacts
- Import mail
- Import new mail for the next 30 days
- Add label to all imported mail
Choose your import options then click Start Import to initiate the import, which continues even if you sign out of Gmail.
Google advertises the import process as taking 24-48 hours before your
imported messages are accessible in your Gmail account. So just go
ahead and click OK, and write yourself a reminder to double check the
progress of your import via the Accounts and Imports tab. My initial
test import of email from my ISP account (sans private domain name)
began to show up in my Gmail account within the hour after completing
the import process.
Personally, I was curious about this new feature considering some
recent ups and downs with my cable broadband provider, though I am
planning to use it to decommission two old web mail accounts I rarely
access.
Have you tried this new feature to migrate your email to Gmail? Share your experience below.