Often you have tons of emails and contacts in your older email accounts, so making a shift to Gmail is very painful. Situation is even worse for school kids who lose their email address (along with all the emails and contacts) as soon as they graduate from high school. Fortunately, the creators of Gmail have added an import feature using which you can import all the emails and contacts from your older email accounts. Here is how :
- Visit http://mail.google.com/ and logon to your Gmail account.
- Click on the gear like settings icon and then choose Mail settings on the top-right.
- On the Mail settings page, select the Accounts and Import section. Then click on the Import mail and contacts button as shown,
- Enter the email address of the account from which you want to import mail and contacts. Gmail supports almost all the email accounts with POP3 access and other popular webmail accounts.Click on the Continue button.
- Enter the login password for the account from which you want to import mail and contacts. Do not worry, the password is stored securely and deleted as soon as the importing process is over.
- Next choose import options like whether you want to import contacts, import mails, import new mails for next 30 days etc. it is highly recommended that you select all the options. You can also choose how to label tme imported emails. The imported email would be shown under this label in your Gmail inbox. Finally click on the Start import button to begin importing emails.
- That’s it. The importing has started. It may take upto 2 days for the importing to finish and appear in your Gmail inbox. The whole process is carried out at the Gmail servers so you can logout and shutdown your computer.
For more information about this import feature in Gmail, you can check Gmail help pages at http://mail.google.com/support/.