As I wrote in my last post, after almost a decade, I finally gave up on gmail. Last weekend, I moved several thousand messages to a new account on outlook.com, leaving my once-occupied @gmail.com address as a simple forwarder and moving to a more modern service, one that works effortlessly with all my devices.
A little history first.
my primary work email address is associated with my company domain and is hosted on an exchange server managed by intermedia. (I list the reasons why I made that decision in this post.)
I keep my personal mail separate from my work correspondence. Over the years I’ve amassed a collection of addresses on a variety of free email services: Hotmail and its successors; yahoo (barely used); and of course gmail. With this consolidation, all those widely dispersed addresses now go into a single inbox, with one address hosted on a domain I own.
This post explains how I did it and how you can do the same. Please note that the steps I list here will work with any service, not just outlook.com, although you will have to do some research to find the corresponding settings for other services.
Step 1: Set up your new primary email address.
You can use a generic outlook.com address if you want simplicity. however, I strongly believe in the value of having your own email address, even for personal mail. if you rely on an email address that someone else controls, you risk having your account suspended by the owner of that domain for a real or imagined violation of their terms of service. if that account is on a free service run by a large corporation, good luck getting anyone to help you restore your account.
The domain I use for personal email is registered with the Microsoft Custom Domains admin center and I have set up my personal account and the accounts of various family members there. to access mail from that account, I just go to outlook.com and sign in with my personal email address. (If you’d like to do the same, follow the instructions in this post: Why I Use Outlook.com For My Custom Email Accounts (And How You Can Too)
step 2: forward your gmail account to the new address.
You’ll find the forwarding options in the gmail settings menu. After you sign in to your gmail inbox, click the gear icon in the top right corner and then click settings. On the settings page, click the forwarding and pop/imap header to display the page shown here.
if you haven’t set up a forwarding address yet, click add a forwarding address and then enter the address you set up in step 1. gmail will send a confirmation message to that address with a link that you must click before forwarding is enabled.
Note that you have the option to keep forwarded messages in your gmail inbox. I have chosen to delete the copy of gmail. As a result, the only messages left in Gmail are those that are classified as spam and filtered to the spam folder.
(note: it is possible to enable pop or imap access on the gmail account and then “pull” the messages from your main account. I do not recommend this approach, because it introduces additional complexity and delays the receipt of mail sent to your secondary accounts (the only time to use this option is if you are consolidating messages from a pop or imap account where you are not the administrator and therefore cannot set up forwarding).
Step 3: Set up outlook.com to allow you to send messages from your gmail account.
You can skip this step, but I recommend doing it on those occasions when you need to reply to a message using the address it was sent to. as send email in outlook.com.
To enable this feature, sign in to outlook.com, click the gear icon in the upper right corner, and choose more mail settings from the menu. under the manage your account heading, click your email accounts, and then at the bottom of the page, click add a send-only account.
Enter your gmail address and password and outlook.com will configure the server addresses automatically. (To see the values you enter, click advanced options).
Note: If you have enabled two-factor authentication for your gmail account, this setup step will not work correctly with your normal gmail password. you’ll need to disable the extra security or, better yet, generate an app-specific password. You’ll find this option on the Google account security page.
Step 4: Delete any rules you have set for your gmail account.
If you’ve configured gmail filters to automatically process messages by adding labels, you should remove those rules to avoid interfering with forwarding. You’ll find them in your gmail settings, under the filters heading. (If you’re the cautious type and trying to forward as an experiment, you can skip this step or export the filters to an xml file so you can restore them later.)
step 5 (optional): move your old gmail messages to your new outlook folder.
This step is a bit more difficult than it should be. If you use Outlook, you can set your Gmail and Outlook.com folders next to each other, but you can’t drag messages between them. for that task, i used the decidedly unmodern windows live mail, part of the essential windows package.
Install the windows live mail program and set up two accounts: your new primary account and the gmail account you are migrating from. wait for all your messages to download from each other (this can take a while if you have a lot of mail) and then drag the messages out of the gmail folder hierarchy into the outlook.com folders.
and done. Your @gmail.com address is still active and accepting incoming messages, and you can use that account to sign in to any Google services you still use. but your mail now reaches only one inbox.
Any questions?