It can take a few days or, in my case, more than a week. Google uses an external service called ShuttleCloud to do this. This lets you import all the emails from your old Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL or other address. In your new Gmail account, go to Configure Inbox in Settings (the cogwheel icon) and click the tab for Accounts and Import.

The hardest part is finding a usable email address that has not already been taken, though it helps to have an unusual name. If you want to switch from Hotmail to Gmail, or vice versa, then you have to open a new account. This is useful when you have 250,000 or more emails in your inbox. Most importantly, Gmail still paginates emails, which means I can easily skip from the second page of search results to p500 (emails 24,951-25,000). It’s still faster its search and spam-blocking still work better. However, ’s email storage is in addition to the free 5GB you get with OneDrive, whereas Gmail shares its 15GB with Google Drive.Īt the moment, I prefer Gmail. even has the edge in offering more storage. still has folders instead of Gmail’s labels. I like the fact that you can set up to work much like Outlook, the email program from Microsoft Office. Many iterations later, the two services are much closer. (HoTMaiL got its name from HTML.) This made Gmail faster and more responsive. The main one was that it offered 500 times as much storage: 1GB! Gmail also had much better search and spam blocking, and it worked like an app rather than an HTML web page.

In the beginning, Gmail had several significant advantages over Hotmail. Set it to forward all incoming emails to your Hotmail/ inbox and reply from there. This might be handy if you have one you rarely use. Note that you can also add aliases for any of your old email addresses. Microsoft has supported Hotmail addresses since it bought the service in 1997, and I don’t expect it will ever stop supporting them. However, anything sent to your Hotmail address will still arrive in the same inbox, so it doesn’t really matter. If you email everyone from your address, most people will start using it eventually.

You can now use the same inbox to send emails from both your old Hotmail and your new addresses, and switch between them. (You can get to it via the full Settings page, Email, Sync email etc but it’s complicated.) Create an alias in the form and set this as your primary email address. To do this, log into Hotmail and then paste into the address bar. Hotmail General Manager Rick Holzli at the Microsoft offices, California, in 2002.

Hotmail missing email alias inbox