The best way to switch to a new email address

Posted on November 25, 2008 at 5:41 am

Are you looking to move from your old AOL.com email address or old default ISP email address to something better like a Gmail account? If you want to migrate your email from one email service provider to another, there’s a couple of ways you can go about depending on what website you go to.

Earlier I wrote about a service called TrueSwitch that charges a fee, but will transfer all of your email from one service provider to another, like Hotmail to Gmail or Yahoo Mail to Gmail, etc.

While I think that method is worth it for some people who have a crap load of email that they need moved over, it’s not the best if you have only just a few folders of emails! In that case, you migrating from an old email address to a new one is pretty easy.

In this article, I am going to talk about moving from any email service provider to Gmail, since I think it’s the most popular email service right now.

Here is the general outline of what needs to be done in order to move yourself from one email service to Gmail:

Create a Gmail account
Either forward all of your email from your old email accounts to Gmail or setup Gmail so that it automatically checks your old email account
Configure Gmail so that when you reply, it is always with your new email address
Label emails sent to your old accounts in Gmail until you see no more emails coming from those accounts

Did that make sense? Once you create a Gmail account, the best way to set it up is to add all of your old email accounts into Gmail. However, this requires POP3 access and if your current email provider does not allow POP3 access, you will have to have all of your email forwarded to your Gmail account.

First read my previous post on how to check all of your email accounts from Gmail. The only two things I want to add to that article is that you need to check the box “Label incoming messages” and give it a name that refers to that email accounts like “Old Hotmail” or “Old Yahoo”, etc.

Also, in the Accounts tab, make sure the radio button for “Always reply from default address (currently name@gmail.com). This will ensure that if the email was sent to joe@yahoo.com, the reply will be from joe@gmail.com. Eventually, people will start sending to the new email address.

Now if you cannot add an old email account to Gmail because it does not support POP3, then make sure to forward all your email to Gmail. Then in Gmail, go to Labels and create a new label like “Hotmail”, “Yahoo”, or whatever like below:

Now that you have the label, go to Filters and create a new filter. Type the old email address into the To: box and click Next Step.

Then check the box “Apply the label” and choose the new label you just created. This will basically allow you to see how many emails are still coming in on the old email address.

That’s it! Now all you need to do is setup the Vacation responder message in Gmail so that whenever someone sends you an email, it will reply back with your predefined message. Go ahead and write something to the effect that you have a new email address and to please update their address books!

You can activate the Vacation message by clicking on Settings and scroll all the way down on the General tab.

You can turn this off after a little while and hopefully most people you care about will get the message. So in my opinion, this is the best way to switch to a new email address without losing any emails coming into your old accounts while at the same time moving everyone over to the new email address. What do you think? Enjoy!

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