If you want to abandon an old email address and move to something more comprehensive, there are some tricks you can use. Services like Outlook and Gmail allow you to import emails from other accounts quickly and easily. Switching from Outlook to Gmail and vice versa is far from impossible. All you need to do is to overcome some restrictions imposed by the developers.

Importing an email account into Gmail or Outlook isn’t hard at all. In fact, both services offer the tools to copy e-mail messages and directly manage third-party email accounts. To import email accounts into Gmail and Outlook, it is usually enough to simply specify the data to access the mailbox of the third-party provider. Meanwhile, when you need to switch between these two most famous services, you just need to use the Gmail to Outlook migration tool and convert your correspondence to the appropriate format.

Import third-party email accounts into Outlook

Outlook is the Microsoft service for managing online correspondence. Outlook also provides a tool that allows you to import other email accounts, including those of the most famous worldwide providers. The procedure to follow is quite simple: just launch your Outlook, log in with your data, and click on the Options – Connected Accounts. Outlook allows you to directly import Gmail accounts while, in the case of alternative services, you will need to click on “Other email accounts”. By doing so, you will be able to set the connection parameters necessary to connect with the mail account of any third-party service.

By specifying the email account to import, Outlook will try to automatically establish the connection via OAuth or will pre-set the access parameters. When checking the box “Manually specify the account settings”, you can indicate the addresses for the connection to the mail server (POP, IMAP, or SMTP for sending e-mail only) of the other mailing service. IMAP is the protocol created to allow and facilitate the connection and management of e-mails from several devices. If possible, we suggest importing e-mail messages with the IMAP protocol.

Outlook also has an interesting advantage: it has no storage limits. This means that Microsoft software can also be used as a backup of your email archives. The space offered by Outlook is unlimited, which means that it grows as the user’s storage needs to increase. In case you want to move some messages to your Outlook.com account and archive them, our advice is to do it little by little to allow time for Microsoft’s service to increase the available storage.

Import third-party email accounts into Gmail

Gmail provides a simple procedure for importing email accounts managed by other services. By specifying the data (host, username, and password) for accessing the other mail account, you can manage both the Gmail account and the other address from a single interface, with the possibility of keeping separate mail in one or the other email address.

Unlike Outlook, Google, unfortunately, offers the possibility of using only the POP3 protocol while it does not allow the use of the more modern IMAP. The only alternative to using the POP3 protocol to import emails from other accounts is to use third-party migration tools. This functionality does nothing but connects to an account that supports the use of the OAuth protocol such as Yahoo, AOL, Outlook, and Hotmail and extends the functionality of Gmail to mail archives stored elsewhere.

To import an email account into Gmail, simply login to Gmail then access the configuration tab. By clicking on the “Add an email account link”, you can request Gmail to connect to an email account managed by another service and proceed with importing the messages contained in the inbox. Once the configuration is complete, if you have set up the third-party account as described above, the emails “belonging” to it will be immediately accessible in Gmail.

As soon as you have completed the migration of emails from the old to the new email account, you can set up a rule for handling incoming messages. In particular, you can ensure that messages received on the old email address are automatically forwarded to the new account.