How To Import Yahoo/Hotmail Emails and Contacts Into Gmail

Yesterday we discussed how you can  operate and manage Yahoo/Hotmail or any mail account from your Gmail account without letting know anyone. Today we come up with the next post in this series where we talk about complete switch from Yahoo/Hotmail to Gmail without losing older emails and contacts.

Moving email accounts isn’t an easy decision. Your old email account has lots of important emails and contacts which you would not want to lose. Luckily, Gmail provides an easy way to import all your old emails and contacts from other email clients such as Yahoo and Hotmail.

Apart from that, Gmail will also continue to import new mails of your old mail account for the next 30 days. This is the time frame given to you which you can use to let your contacts know that you’ve switched to a new email address.

Here are the following steps to create a new Gmail account and import your old account.

1. Visit Gmail and create a new email account.

2. Click on Settings button which is present on the top right of your Gmail. Under Accounts and Import tab click on Import mail and contacts button.

gmail-import

3. A new window will pop up . Enter your Yahoo or Hotmail address (or any other email address) in the box provided. Click Continue button.

gmail-import1

4. Enter the correct password of your email account which you entered in the previous step.

gmail-import2

5. Check all the options. You can add labels to your imported emails. I gave a label “Hotmail” so that I could easily identify the imported mail.

gmail-import3

6. A window will appear which says that “It may take several hours (sometimes up to 2 days) before you start to see imported messages” So be patient.

gmail-import4

6. You can check the status of your import anytime by visiting Settings -> Accounts and Import. The screenshot given below shows that import has been done.

gmail-import5

So in this way you can switch to a brand new Gmail account and import all your previous emails and contacts.

Have you switched to Gmail recently? Do you plan to switch soon? Let us know about your Gmail experiences in comments.


Written By and published on Saturday, March 13th, 2010.


  • http://hphacks.blogspot.com/ siddharth

    Nice technic . I liked it !

    You can also use gmails improt contacts in CSV format tool

  • http://bloggertowp.org Blogspot to Wordpress

    Since the time I started using Gmail, I never paid attention on Hotmail and Yahoo.. though lots of my old contacts are still on yahoo and I never bothered to import them here on Gmail.. This will be handy for me…

  • Pingback: 16 Awesome New Features Of Windows Live Hotmail You Need To Know

  • Pradeep Chennai82

    its not working… it shows error ( Could not validate this combination of email address and password.) , am putting correct id and password it shows the same error ,, but if using in yahoo mail ( id and Password ) its working … Pls help my d pradeep.chennai82@gmail.com

    • http://www.guidingtech.com Abhijeet Mukherjee

      may be you are putting the wrong email address there… yahoo has many types of them – @yahoo.in, @yahoo.co.in, @yahoo.com.. find out which of these types is your yahoo mail address and try it again.

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