Last week we introduced a new personal email service called outlook.com. In my previous post we described how to upgrade from hotmail to outlook.com. Now, let’s take a look at how to upgrade from gmail to outlook.
get modern email without giving up your gmail account
upgrading from gmail to outlook.com offers many benefits, including:
- a fast, modern user interface that shows you more of your email with less clutter
- an address book that connects to facebook, twitter, and linkedin, so all your contacts are in one place
- facebook pictures in messages from your friends, messages that allow you to chat with your friends on facebook right from your inbox
- great tools to help manage newsletters, offers and more
- integrated skydrive and office for easy sharing and collaboration
and of course, outlook.com respects your privacy: it won’t use the content of your personal email to serve you ads; in fact, you won’t see ads when you read your friends’ email.
You don’t even have to tell people to change the way they communicate with you. you can keep your gmail address and you can receive all your mail directly in outlook. here are the five steps:
- Get an outlook.com account
- Forward your new mail from gmail
- Set up outlook.com to be able to send email using your gmail address
- connect your address book to gmail
- import all your old mail
step 1: get an outlook.com account
when you update from gmail, it will fall into one of three camps:
- you already have a hotmail account (@hotmail, @msn, @live, etc.)
- use your gmail address to access microsoft services like xbox live or skydrive ( @gmail )
- you don’t have a microsoft account and you don’t use any microsoft services
We’ll cover each of these, below.
Already have a hotmail account (@hotmail, @msn, @live, etc.)?
Simply log in to http://outlook.com with your hotmail account to upgrade to outlook.com. Next, we’ll show you how to send your gmail messages to your outlook.com inbox.
do you use your gmail address to access microsoft services, like xbox live or skydrive?
if yes, it means you already have a microsoft account and can use it to sign in to outlook.com.
Go ahead and sign in to http://outlook.com with your gmail address and microsoft password. If you have never verified your gmail address with microsoft, you will be prompted to do so.
don’t have a microsoft account?
Getting a new outlook.com account is easy. just go to http://outlook.com, click “sign up” and fill out the form to create a new account.
You will receive a welcome message and then you will be in your new, clean inbox. keep this window open while you do the next step.
step 2: tell gmail to forward your new mail to outlook.com as soon as it arrives
It’s easy to set up your gmail account to forward new messages to your outlook.com inbox. you must first connect the two accounts for forwarding and then tell gmail to start.
to configure forwarding:
- click here to login to gmail
- click “add a forwarding address”. type your outlook.com account name (for example, myname@outlook.com)
- make sure the address is correct and click OK on the confirmation dialogs
gmail will send a confirmation email to your outlook.com inbox. go back to your outlook.com inbox (the window you kept open in step 1), click the “refresh” icon next to the folders (or just click “inbox”) and you should see the confirmation email.
Open the message and click the confirmation link. you just confirmed that you want gmail to forward the email to your outlook.com account.
now you are ready to tell gmail to start forwarding:
- click here to return to the settings page for gmail forwarding
- click “forward a copy of incoming mail to” your outlook account. By default, this also saves a copy of the email to your gmail inbox.
- click “save changes”
leave the gmail settings page open; you will return to it in the next step.
Step 3: Set your gmail address as a “send as” address.
You will want to enable outlook to use your gmail address when sending mail. this lets outlook know that messages forwarded from gmail were actually sent to you and allows you to avoid getting the “this content has been blocked for your security” message when you read those messages.
(You can skip this step if you used your gmail address to sign in to outlook.com. You’re done!)
in outlook, click the “cog” setting in the top right corner, then click “more mail settings”
- under “manage your account”, click “send/receive emails from other accounts”
- on the next screen, under “you can send emails from these accounts”, click click “add another account to send from”.
- enter your gmail account name in the box labeled “add an email address” and click “send verification email”
Now, go back to the gmail settings page (see step 2) and you should see a new email from outlook that says “outlook: please verify your email address”. open this email and click the verification link.
you will receive a verification message and you can click “return to inbox”.
that’s it. Now when you compose an email or reply to an email, you can select your gmail address from the “From” dropdown. but you don’t even need to do that when replying to a forwarded message from gmail; outlook does it automatically for you.
a side note about “sent on behalf”
You may notice that messages you send using your gmail address will be sent “on behalf of” your gmail account. this means that outlook is actually sending the email, but setting the “from:” address to be your gmail address. the from: header in most email clients will look like this:
from: myname@outlook.com on behalf of dick craddock (myname@gmail.com)
We got feedback from some of you that you don’t like the “on behalf of” header and so we’re working on changing this. stay tuned!
step 4: link your gmail contacts to outlook.com
you can easily import all your contacts from gmail to outlook. we will go to the people page to import contacts. just click the little “down arrow” next to outlook in the header (it will appear when you hover over the header).
then click on “people”
now click on “google contacts”
you will see a wizard that will guide you through connecting your outlook.com account to your gmail contacts:
click “connect” and enter your gmail login information. You will see a confirmation screen, showing you that Gmail is confirming that Microsoft is requesting to connect to your Gmail contacts. click “allow access”. you will get a final confirmation screen and you can click “done”.
You will also receive a confirmation email in your outlook.com inbox informing you that you have connected contacts from your gmail account.
It may take a while to import your gmail contacts. when they are, they will appear in outlook on both people and compose pages.
Step 5 – Put your old mail on outlook.com
You now have all new gmail messages to forward to your outlook.com account. you may also want to import your oldest messages. you can use a tool called “trueswitch” to do it.
click here to go to trueswitch. You’ll notice this page refers to “hotmail” accounts, but it works just fine for outlook accounts. Since you’ve already set up Gmail Forwarding, Gmail Sending, and connected your contacts, all you need to do is get your old mail and, optionally, your calendar events.
- go to trueswitch
- enter your gmail name and password in the box labeled “other email:”
- enter your outlook name and password in the box labeled “hotmail email:”
- uncheck everything except the first checkbox, “copy your emails”
click “copy to windows live hotmail”.
A confirmation screen will appear. Please note that it may take up to 24 hours to copy all email from your Gmail account to your Outlook account. Your gmail mail will appear in a new folder called “gmail_mail”, your gmail labels will be assigned to folders on outlook.com, and you will receive a confirmation email with the details.
using outlook.com
We hope you love using outlook.com. We’ll be making continual improvements to Outlook during the preview period, and we’d love to hear from you. You can send us feedback directly from outlook.com: just click the settings “gear” in the upper right corner and click “feedback”.
Thank you for using outlook.com.
dick craddock, group program manager, outlook.com