San Francisco — Users of free webmail service of Google, which last week announced an update to its Gmail with an impressive migration feature that allows viewing and importing contacts and e-mails from other competing services to their Gmail accounts including Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and some others.
Gmail’s new “migration feature” enables users to transfer their e-mail messages and contacts forwarded from their old accounts for 30 days, from competing providers, which gives them time to inform their friends or others about their new e-mail addresses, and of course they can check their old accounts as well.
Users can select to import all their contacts, existing messages and new mail from services such as Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL, and a few dozen others. The move indicates that you can still view those special messages sent to the old account in your new Gmail account.
“It has been easy to auto-forward all your Gmail messages to any other service, and now it is much easier to go the other way round too,” said Gmail engineer Chad Parry in a blog post.
However, before the update, Gmail users had to import contacts from other email accounts by using POP3 mail fetching and then uploading their contacts in a CSV file. Nevertheless, this new feature more than simplifies the task of importing them. It also delivers the option to import the e-mail archive, which is very important.
Furthermore, the new “migration feature” is currently available only to the newly created Gmail accounts, but it will soon be available to all the existing accounts, Parry wrote on the blog. Users will find the new feature under the “Accounts and Import” tab under the “Settings” menu when their account has been updated.
Unfortunately, businesses and schools using Google Apps will not be able to take advantage of this new migration options.
According to Parry, explaining the reason said the new “migration feature” will not be available for schools and businesses using Google Apps, because they use e-mail addresses ending in their own domain instead of gmail.com.