One solution to the email address problem is to register your own domain. The drawbacks are that Yahoo Mail no longer allows forwarding, and you have to agree to your information being shared with other Oath properties. You could use it to consolidate multiple accounts.
Yahoo Mail provides 1TB of free storage space, so it swallows a full Gmail or mailbox and still leaves you with 98.5% free. Oath Inc also owns AOL, Tumblr, the Huffington Post, Weblogs and various other things. If you want to open a new mailbox to provide an online backup, it would be better to use Yahoo Mail, which is now owned by Verizon’s Oath division. That doesn’t leave much room for subject lines, so you may want to delete the email address label. First, every email gets tagged with the full email address of the old mailbox, which might be quite long (eg Gmail doesn’t do folders or sub-folders, so it adds labels for the old folder names. Not all of them, of course, just enough to be really annoying. Gmail makes a complete mess of tagging the incoming mail, and happily puts thousands of emails that you have filed away in folders – a good sign that you want to keep them – into the spam box.
This is also not very practical because you start with a full mailbox. The main one for me was deleting thousands of emails to get inside Gmail’s storage limit. Mail transfersĪlthough it’s easy to get Gmail to fetch all your email from another service, this is not without problems. Now you have a backup of all your emails online, and if you get locked out of one mailbox, you can use the other. In fact, you can add your Gmail address as a Hotmail alias, and add your Hotmail address as a Gmail alias. Also tick the box that says “Keep a copy of forwarded messages” so that you can answer emails from either Gmail or Hotmail. Next, go to “Forward my emails to:” and enter your new email address. In Hotmail, go to the full Settings page, select Email and then Forwarding, and click the radio button next to “Start forwarding”. Google’s Gmail has had a redesign this year. Once you have all your emails in Gmail, set the old address to forward incoming emails to your Gmail inbox. 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.