How to Forward All Your Hotmail Emails to Gmail

Older readers remember a time when Hotmail, Microsoft’s free email offering that dominated the messaging market for a decade at the turn of the century. The Hotmail name disappeared a long time ago; Microsoft added the Hotmail brand to the Outlook family of products in 2013 and focused all of its marketing and development efforts on Outlook. However, Hotmail’s market penetration was such that for tens of millions of email users, it is and always will be Hotmail rather than Outlook. In this article, I’ll use them interchangeably as I show you how to migrate your existing messages from Hotmail to Gmail and also how to forward new messages.

How to switch from Hotmail to Gmail

Gmail has taken the email crown from Microsoft’s offering. with over 1.5 billion stable users compared to Microsoft’s relatively paltry 400 million users. However, both systems are very similar in terms of functionality and have similar levels of security, features and ease of use. However, many people simply prefer the look and feel of Gmail over Hotmail. Fortunately, it’s very easy to switch from one to the other and you can even keep your old account running in case you change your mind.

You can automate email forwarding so that emails are automatically sent from Hotmail to Gmail before you migrate permanently.

Forward all emails from Hotmail to Gmail

The first step in the migration process is to set up email forwarding so that incoming Outlook email is automatically sent to your Gmail account. This is a simple process that asks the Outlook email server to make a copy of all the mail it receives and forward them to your Gmail address. It’s free, easy to set up, and can run indefinitely until you stop it.

1. Log in to your hotmail account through your browser.
2. Select the Settings icon (the gear wheel in the top right corner) and scroll down and select See all Outlook settings.
3. Select the Mail tab, then Forwarding.
4. Select Enable forwarding and enter your Gmail address.
5. Check the box next to Save a copy of forwarded messages so that your Hotmail account continues to have all your email.
6. Close the Settings dialog box.

From now on, all emails you receive through Hotmail/Outlook will have a copy forwarded to your Gmail account.

Migrate from Hotmail to Gmail

The next step, once you’re ready to make the jump permanently, is to migrate all your existing emails from Hotmail to Gmail. It’s a simple process that will import all your Hotmail/Outlook folders and emails to Gmail. First, do some cleaning tasks on your Hotmail account to remove all the spam and junk. You may want to go through all your email folders and get rid of things you know you don’t need. (You can save a little time on this task by checking out this TechJunkie article on how to automatically delete spam from Hotmail.)

To actually migrate the information:

1. Open Gmail and select the gear icon to access Settings.
2. Select the Accounts and Import eyelash.
3. Select Import email and contacts.
4. Add your Hotmail account in the pop-up box and follow the wizard.

The wizard will guide you through setting up the account import and what to include and what not to include. It’s a few steps, but your Hotmail will be imported into Gmail in about an hour, depending on how busy the servers are.

Send and receive Hotmail from Gmail

If you don’t want to take the leap and leave Hotmail behind forever, you can send Hotmail emails from your Gmail account. It’s a cool feature that has been around for some time and can be used with most email accounts. It means you can read, send and receive Hotmail from Gmail and you only have to log in to one email to see them all.

1. Open Gmail and select the gear icon to access Settings.
2. Select the Accounts and Import eyelash.
3. Select Check email from other accounts and then click Add an email account.
4. Add your Hotmail address and password information. Enter the server details if prompted, they will be pop3.live.com as POP server, 995 like the port, and Always use SSL when retrieving email.
5. Check the box next to Leave a copy of the recovered email on the server.
6. Select Add Account.
7. Select Yes, I want to be able to send mail as… and Next step.
8. Enter the shipping address and Next step.
9. Select Send verification to send a unique code from Gmail to Hotmail.
10. Log in to Hotmail, get the code and add it to the box. Select Verify.

Now that the two accounts are linked, you can send emails using your Hotmail address by opening a new email and selecting the From address using the drop-down menu. Any recipient will see your Hotmail address in the From p even if it was sent using Gmail. Use Hotmail as a replacement to make life a little easier.

While this tutorial covers forwarding emails from Hotmail to Gmail. You can import most email addresses into Gmail using the same process. Most free and ISP-provided emails will work; You may just need to import specific email server settings into Gmail to keep things running smoothly. There are many other tips and tricks you can learn about Gmail; check out this Kindle book at Gmail Tips, Tricks, and Tools.

Have you switched from Hotmail to Gmail? Did you follow this process to forward all your emails from Hotmail to Gmail? Let us know how it went if so!