Can You Change Email Providers Without Losing Everything?

When you are unhappy with your mobile phone carrier, you get to switch to another while you retain your old number. Why can’t you do the same thing with email? If you are on a webmail service simply because it’s the address you’ve given out to everyone, there’s a way to switch to another service that you like.

It’s easy to switch to any email service that implements the latest modern technologies. These services include ways to automatically transfer contact lists, old email catalogs and other settings quickly and effortlessly from one webmail service to another. The exact way in which you switch from one provider to another, though, can change.

Switching to Gmail or Outlook Mail

Your first step should be to sign up to the new service that you’ve picked. Gmail’s import method used to be very simple not long ago. There was an Import mail and contacts link under Settings . These days, they use something called Mail Fetcher.

To set up Mail Fetcher, you need to make sure that your old email provider supports something called POP access technology. Your new Gmail account needs to have POP access enabled, too. If you are moving over from Yahoo! Mail, this is difficult – Yahoo! asks you to pay $20 a year to upgrade to Yahoo! Plus if you wish to use POP access. There is a way around this problem, though.

To set up POP access on Gmail, you need to go to Settings , Accounts , Check mail from other accounts using POP 3 and then Add a POP 3 mail account of your own. Here, you need to type in the email address of your old account and your password. Once you click on Add account , your email should begin transferring.

If you are moving to Outlook mail, the transition is very simple. Just needs to fire up the tree switch wizard and key in your username and password for your old account.

What to do about the new email that comes into your old account

Even if you tell everyone on your contacts list that you’ve moved to a new account, chances are that they will forget and continue to send email to your old account. Luckily, Mail Fetcher helps you out here, as well.

In Gmail, you need to click on Add a POP 3 mail account of your own under Settings and Accounts to set this up. On Outlook, you need to click on Add a send and receive account under Settings , More settings and Your email accounts . These settings help you get email from your old account over to your new account on a regular basis.

About circumventing the Yahoo! charge

Thankfully, there’s a way to get your old catalog of emails from Yahoo! without paying for the POP 3 upgrade. Microsoft Outlook’s TruSwitch Wizard is able to import Yahoo’s email catalog without POP 3. Once you get your email catalog out of Yahoo!, you can either keep them in Outlook or set up POP 3 in Outlook two move them over to Gmail or any other service.