With recent privacy changes at Google, Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon and is now offering Gmail users three easy steps to jump ship over to Hotmail. Microsoft claims to offer better features with Hotmail as well as being the “best email service in the world.”
“Hotmail’s come a long way and we definitely think it’s worth giving Hotmail another look. We’ve started to see some folks make the move from Gmail to Hotmail, and so we want to share with you how to do this,” Microsoft stated in an official blog post.
Microsoft offered several reasons as to why Hotmail was better including having Facebook integration, ability to share tons of photos and large attachments, Office Web Apps integration, and email sorting. Here are the steps to migrate from Gmail to Hotmail:
- Create a Hotmail account. If you don’t already have one, you need to create a Hotmail account. The best way to do this is to get a new email address either @hotmail.com or @ live.com. Or, if you already have an email address you want to keep using, you can keep using it and sign up here. You don’t have to use our domain.
- Import your old messages from Gmail. You’ll probably want to keep your old email and contacts so we’ve made it simple to bring them in. TrueSwitch is an easy tool which will import your email and contacts and forward any new email to Hotmail for 90 days. Go to the TrueSwitch site and follow the steps there. When you sign back in to Hotmail, you’ll notice that it’s beginning to import your emails (this could take a few hours if you have a lot of emails to bring over).
- Connect your Gmail account. This step is optional, but if you want to make sure you receive future messages from Gmail, you can have Hotmail automatically get all new emails that are sent to your old Gmail account. These are the steps to connect your accounts: In your inbox, click Options and then More options, then Click Sending/receiving email from other accounts, then Click Add an email account, and finally Provide your Gmail account details.
Just recently, Google announced a new change to its privacy policy that basically means 60 different privacy policies would be condensed into just one. “The main change is for users with Google Accounts,” explains Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering at Google. “Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.”
