Moving to Gmail
I’ve never been bashful about how much I love Gmail and like using it on the iPhone. But I’ve been remiss in giving tips on using Gmail on the desktop, or even converting to Gmail from whatever mail system you use now.
If you’re like most people, then you’ve got several years of email messages and other data, and maybe you’ve thought about converting to Gmail but the thought of moving all that data is just too daunting. How, you might be wondering, do I get started?
The easiest way is probably to sign up for Gmail and just leave your old email account alone (but set it to forward new messages into Gmail).
When I first made the move to break away from Microsoft Outlook, I signed up with Yahoo! Mail. It worked fine and I was happy with it—that is until Gmail came along. As you might remember, you couldn’t just sign up for Gmail, you had to be “invited.” Well, I pulled out all the stops, hitting up all my friends for an invite, which was actually pointless because none of them had that kind of influence. When I finally did wrangle an invite, I made the switch and I’ve never looked back.
In my own case, I just left my Yahoo account active and set it to forward any future mail to my Gmail account. I didn’t bother to try to move all of the messages into Gmail (this was before IMAP), and to this day all of my data is still sitting in my Yahoo account (I’ve made sure that a few messages are still delivered to that account just to keep it active).
From time to time, I go back into Yahoo Mail and search for a message, but, I’ve found, I really don’t need to do that very often—rarely, in fact.
If you are still an Outlook user, you can move your data into Gmail. Vinny Lingham just wrote an excellent article on getting the job done. I came across it this morning, and I’m excited because I’ve got a new blog to add to those I read on a regular basis. Vinny has got some quality content that’s worth a look.
At any rate, with the advent of the iPhone and many other smartphones, there has never been a better time to break free from Microsoft Outlook, or from whatever program is keeping you chained to your computer. Now, more than ever, it’s very realistic to move your data into cyberspace and to live happily ever after.
