Migrate to Windows Live Hotmail from Gmail, Yahoo and more

Just recently Yahoo! Mail Team partnered with a migration service called TrueSwitch to enable their users to migrate their emails, contacts and calendar to Yahoo! Mail. Now Microsoft has teamed-up with the same service for providing a convenient way to copy your emails and address book to your Windows Live account.

It is an easy three step process to migrate to Hotmail from any of these email providers: AOL, Gmail, Comcast, Yahoo!, Cox, Earthlink, MSN, Netscape, Netzero, Juno, CS, Optonline, and Worldnet. It may take upto 24 hours to initiate the process and may also lock down your Gmail account, due to heavy suspicious activity (if you are migrating from Gmail).

I still remember those days, when I had to migrate from Outlook to Thunderbird. It was really painful and I had to struggle a lot before migrating between desktop email management software, but now with services like TrueSwitch, its incredible simple.

Ryan speculates that that Google might also be working with TrueSwitch to offer similar migration service. I tried my luck by replacing “winlive” from the URL with “aol” and it seems like AOL has some sort of TrueSwitch client to migrate. Try it here

I’m starting to wonder how much bandwidth and storage space is wasted on copying your entire mailbox to another server. For instance, my Gmail mailbox weighs around 1.21 GB and if I had to backup my mails on both Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, it would occupy consume 3.63 GBs of storage space. Of course, not everybody has the fancy of migrating.

It would have been awesome, if we had a similar service to migrate our Picasa Web Album photos to Flickr or Photobucket.

This post was published by on August 28, 2007

About the Author: Thilak Rao works as a Social Media Expert. He is one of the first professional bloggers from India, and he loves to write, travel and click photos. Follow him on Twitter @thilak

  • http://techtoday.110mb.com Ankur Mittal

    I too blogged this and is really a useful information!! Thanx for the heads up

  • http://www.bloggingtune.com Ram karthik

    Good move by Microsoft but I don’t guess people will move. If Google brings this, then I might move my Hotmail ID to Gmail.

  • http://techlike.info Amit

    Neat, within 24 hrs migrating to hotmail. Now no need to copy the mailbox to another server.

  • http://www.tech4dummies.net praveen

    I think google is already supporting this