How to move email messages
to another account. Hi, everyone.
Leo No10boom here for Askleo.com. If you're not getting my weekly email
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to learn more and sign up today. So let's read today's question. It's one that I hear frequently. "For years, my wife and I have used
an email service with an annual fee. It is always met our needs,
but there is probably no good reason to continue paying fees for what
is available free elsewhere. However, even after pruning, we have hundreds of old emails stored
on servers at our current service. Is there any way we can transfer
the old emails to a new email provider in bulk? We would probably
transfer to Gmail or Yahoo!" So the answer, of course,
is maybe it depends. There's rarely a simple yes or no answer
to any question that I get asked. So what I want to do is I want to show you
a couple of po10tial solutions to the problem you're facing here and some
of the characteristics of when might when might work
and when it might not. So over here in Windows 10, I have two
email accounts open in my Web browser. I have my Hotmail account. AskLeoexample@Hotmail.com and then in another tab,
I have askLeotest@Gmail.com. So I have these two accounts ready to go. What I'm going to do for the purposes of this video is pre10d that I
am moving from Hotmail to Gmail. Now you can see that in my Hotmail. I have exactly one message. You clearly have hundreds. Just assume that this one message represents the hundreds
of email messages you have. They'll all get moved. I just needed to weed out all the spam that shows up at this account
before showing it to you. And you can see that even this message is technically spam, but it's
at least an example message. So option number one is. Import, it would be nice if you could import your
messages directly from one account to another and as it turns out in Gmail,
you could do something like that. So if you're moving to Gmail,
if you're planning on Gmail being your new account, your new user interface,
this is one option. Hit the gear and Gmail, see all settings. And then in accounts and import, you'll see that there's something
called important mail and contacts. That sounds like exactly
what we're trying to do. If we click on that, you'll see it begins a process of asking
you, OK, where are you coming from? What is the email address
of the account you want to import? In my case, I want to enter my Hotmail email address and then
continue the process. I'm not going to because I
don't actually want to do this. This is not the approach that I recommend
you take, but it is a simple approach. So it may appeal to you
depending on the account that you're moving from and the account
that you're moving to. If it even has an important function, you may get all of your mail,
you may not get your folders. You may or may not get your contacts. This is kind of one of those scenarios
where it really does depend on the characteristics of both email
services, the one that you're you're currently at and trying to move from and
the one that you're trying to move to. But since this is such a simple solution, it is an approach that might
be worth investigating. It's important to note
that this is a one time deal. You move your things,
you're importing everything from your old account to your new, and then
you carry on using your new. We have some more flexible solutions, a little bit more complicated,
so more flexible solutions down the road. But I wanted to show you this one
because it is conceptually simple. And if everything works on both ends,
you could be done. Like I said, it's not the one I suggest
and it's not the one that's going to resolve most of the issues
that you might be interested in. So with that having been said,
great, we've got our two email accounts. We've got a Gmail account ready to take
the the new become our new account. And then we've got the Hotmail account,
the account that we're moving from. My preferred approach is more work, my preferred approach is that you download
and install a desktop email program. In my case, I'm actually going to do this. I'm going to show you doing this. What we're going to do is. Download Thunderbird. Thunderbird is the email program, the desktop email
program that I 10d to recommend. This will also work with a number of other desktop email programs, Microsoft Office's
Outlook being the most common example. There are others.
There are some where it doesn't work. I can tell you from experience that this does not work with the desktop email
program that comes with Windows 10. So you're going to need
to install something else. And Thunderbird, if you're not doing anything else,
if you don't already have a solution that you prefer,
Thunderbird would be the one that I would suggest, given that the
installer has begun. I'm going to go ahead and close those additional tabs because we
don't need them anymore. And I'm going to minimize the browser. We may be coming back to that. We're going to install Thunderbird. I'm going to always do custom installments. Default location, we'll
go ahead and let it install or create its icons. Will let it use Thunderbird
as my default mail application. This is up to you. What this means is that whenever the system needs to send email,
be it because you clicked on a mail link on a webpage or for some other reason,
it will bring up Thunderbird. Right now, you may not have it bringing up
anything or you may have it complaining. This is one solution to that
problem at the same time. So Thunderbird's installed and we'll
go ahead and launch it now. Spoiler, I actually had installed
Thunderbird on this machine before and you can see that it is already
configured for my Hotmail account. It's the account that I've been using,
if you will, on this machine. If this had been my day to day account, my day to day machine,
then this makes sense. Thunderbird is already configured for the account that I've been using
and the account that I want to move from. What I want to do next is
add the Gmail account. Now in Thunderbird.
The way I might do that is to hit the alt key to get the the menu to display
and then go tools, account settings, which now shows us all of these
settings for the accounts. We happen to have account actions,
add a mail account. So we are now going to add. I am going to suggest that it remember the password for me,
and since it is a long, strong, untouchable password, I'm actually
going to paste it from another window. We continue. IMAP, this is the important part of this setup, I strongly recommend that you use
IMAP and we'll see why here in a moment. Well done. Gmail, because of the way Gmail does authentication, they want
me to sign in again. Since I have two factor installed on that account, I now need to respond
to or at least read the message that. Was just sent to me and that six
digit code I just got on my phone is that don't ask again on this device. We need to allow Mozilla Thunderbird
access to our email. That's what we're doing.
It makes total sense. So we're going to allow that. Now, what you'll see here is that we have
two accounts, we have our Askleo.com example at Hotmail dot com and ah
Askleo.com test at Gmail dot com by close the account settings, you can
see that they're both listed here. If ask Leo example at Hotmail and I've got this, ask Leo tested Gmail
and look, it has new mail. If I click on that, sure enough,
there's a security alert that says, hey, Thunderbird was just allowed
access to your email. If this step had been performed by a hacker, somebody not
authorized that message. Getting sent to that account and to all the recovery email addresses associated
with that account is an attempt to alert the rightful
account holder that something is going on. Since I am the rightful account holder. Yeah, this makes total sense. This is exactly what I did. So I'm going to go ahead
and delete that message. Now, the magic, if we click on the inbox,
for Askleo.com example, you can see that I've got my one message,
you again will have hundreds. At least that's the setup that we were talking about when we asked
the original question. I'm going to select that message. If I had multiple messages, I might do a control, a to select
all of the messages in my inbox. If I wanted a subset of the message,
I could click on one message and then shift click on another
to select a range of messages. There's a number of ways to select
the messages were about to operate on. Then the magic,
I'm going to click, hold and drag this message from my
Hotmail inbox to my Gmail inbox. Now you can see
the message has disappeared from Hotmail, we moved it, and if I go to the inbox
over on Gmail, there's the message. If I now go to the Web based version of these accounts,
the Web interface to each of these two accounts, you'll see that the message
has disappeared from my Hotmail account. But it has, in fact, appeared
over here in my Google account. I've moved all the messages, I have solved the problem,
I have actually moved all of the messages from the inbox of one account
into the inbox of another. But we're not quite done. Let's say we didn't want to move, but in fact, we wanted those messages
to stay in the original inbox. In addition, we want didn't want to move. We wanted to copy. I'm going to copy it back. I'm clicking and holding. I'm dragging it over
to the inbox for Hotmail. Now I'm holding down the control key and you'll see that underneath
the arrow there's a little plus. That means it's about to make a copy
of whatever it is you're dropping. Now, we have that same
message in both inboxes. Now, at this point,
you might consider yourself done because you've moved all your email
messages from one account to another. Using your desktop email program, you can now continue to use
both accounts simultaneously. You can continue to receive email in your old Hotmail account,
the account that you're leaving, and you can then continue to use the email
that comes and goes in your new Gmail account, the account
that you're moving to. Now, in my case, I happen to have
used Hotmail and Gmail as examples. They are just examples of this approach of using a desktop email program to move
or copy email messages from one account to another, works with any email provider
that supports the EMAP protocol. IMAP is important because it will allow
you to view the messages and the folders on both accounts and move the folders
containing all of the messages. Remember I said earlier that the airport probably is going to only going to move
the messages that are in your inbox. This approach using a desktop email
program to move everything from one account to another
allows you to move the folders. You want to ignore the folders. You don't move the messages
you want and so forth. The trick is simply that moving a message
on your desktop from one account to another causes that move to also
then be uploaded to the online account. That's why we're using IMAP. That's how IMAP works. It keeps everything in sync. So if you want to, you can continue to use your Thunderbird or your desktop email
program as your email interface. On the other hand, if you don't want to,
after everything has been moved, you can simply close Thunderbird
and get on with your life. Using your new email account online, you've moved everything
from one account to another. Now, I do want to take a look at a couple of other solutions that are less powerful,
less elegant, but something worth noting. I'm going to go back to Gmail for a second to look at another
approach to this problem. I'm going to hit the settings button, see all settings back to account
and import where we were earlier. You'll notice that there was a setting here called check mail
from other accounts. Remember that? I said that import using import mail
and contacts above is a one time deal. Check email from other
accounts is ongoing. What this allows you to do is much like we
have Thunderbird configured to download email from my Hotmail account,
we can now configure Gmail to essentially download or transfer email
from my Hotmail account ongoing. Every so of10 it'll check for new email
over on Hotmail and bring it into Gmail. You have your choice of whether or not you want to leave those
messages on Hotmail or not. But this is another approach. It works as long as the Hotmail account continues to work, as long as the account
you're moving from continues to work. Now, in the case of the original question, we're talking about moving
from a paid account. So I'm assuming at some point
you're going to stop paying for it. At that point, this approach will no
longer work and you'll start to get error messages when you no longer
have access to that account. But it is an approach if you're going
to keep the old account or if you want to just keep sucking up messages as long
as the old account continues to exist. So that's another approach to solving
the same problem using Gmail. And finally, there's one other
solution that I really dislike. But I have to mention that just because worst case, if you're not getting
a lot of email, I've got hundreds. But if you've only got one like I do,
another approach, of course, is to take that message and manually
forward it to your new account. This gets really cumbersome, really quick,
and it actually modifies every message, adding a forward header
to it and so forth. I have to have to throw it out there for comple10ess because it's one
of the things that people do think about when they are talking about moving
messages from one account to another. Like I said, it's great for one or two where you don't care if
the headers get mixed up. But if you're moving a lot of email and you want the email to remain in its
original form, then yes, using either an import or a download
or a pop three fetch is the way to go. Now, what I need to talk about. Is what I'll call the fly in the ointment,
one of the things that I have not talked about in moving stuff from one
account to another are your contacts. Contacts are a problem. Now, you'll notice that Gmail original import mail contacts
claims to do contacts. And it may like I said when I was talking about that,
it depends a lot on the capabilities of the email account that you're moving
from as to whether or not Gmail will be able to access your contacts and suck
them up into your Gmail account. If you're doing this with Gmail in the general case, contacts don't work.
They just don't. There's no automated approach to dealing
with contacts that I'm aware of. It's the industry's dirty
little secret, if you will. So the approach that I recommend whenever you are moving an account or have been
dealing with an account online, is that every so of10 you export
your contacts and download them. In the case of Outlook.Com,
that's this people thing. And one of the options somewhere will
be to export contacts, which is great. That is a way to then basically download all of your contacts
into a CSV file, the text file that acts then as your backup
for your list of contacts. Even if you're not moving, you should do this periodically if you're
using an online webmail interface. But the good news here is that some
email accounts will let you import. So with Gmail, I have to go over to contacts
and then you'll see that there's an import function and one of the options
is to select a ASV. Now, this sounds all well and good,
it really does, but like I said, the fly in the ointment is
that contacts generally don't work. This is where they work, kind of. There is likely to be data loss, in other words, there are going to be
fields in the contacts that you've downloaded from your old account
that won't important to the new one or names may get reorganized or
things may just be different. Unfortunately, that's the state of the art when it comes
to contacts, I don't have a better solution for you,
but it does let you get the main stuff, the names and the email addresses at a
minimum from one account to the other. But be aware that there may be some data loss that you'll want to probably
manually clean up later. So I hope that was helpful. It's a it's a complicated situation to try
and move from one account to another. There's a real high barrier
to entry to make this. I don't even want to say that it's easy. It's it's not easy. It's work involved. But that makes making sure you're choosing the correct destination all
that much more important. And from my perspective, it's really an argument for using
a desktop email program, because, as you saw, we can move emails and folders
from one account to another very easily. And once you've imported your contacts into your desktop email program,
those contacts are then available to all the accounts that you happen
to have configured in that program. So that's my suggestion. I hope it was helpful for the original
article on which this video was based for related links, for comments
and much more, visit askleo.com/130388. I'm Leo No10boom.
Thanks for watching.
