Gmail series

10. How to import mail and contacts from another email account into Gmail

Before you begin manually copying any of your contacts and mail from other email accounts, you should know that Gmail can automatically import mail and contacts from many popular free email providers. This tutorial will you show you how to use that feature, simply titled Import mail and contacts.

1) It can be found under Settings.

2) Go to the Accounts and Import tab.

3) Then, click Import mail and contacts.

4) First, tell Gmail the email account you would like to import mail and contacts from.

5) Click Continue.

6) Then, enter the account's password, and click Continue.

7) Next, you need to specify the import options, or just leave it all as the defaults. By default, Gmail will import all contacts and mail from the account, as well as all new mail the account receives for the next 30 days. All imported mail will be labelled with the account's email address.

8) Let's change the label to simply "Yahoo". When finished here, click Start import.

9) It could take several hours or even up to 2 days for the import to complete. You will be notified when the import has finished. Click OK to close this window.

10) The import we started now shows up under the Import mail and contacts section. You can check on its status here. To stop an import, click its stop link.

11) When the import is complete, you'll receive a notice at the top of Gmail. Its status will also be updated in the same place as before. Once the initial import has completed, you can still stop the import to prevent any additional mail from being forwarded. All the data the initial import retrieved will remain intact.

12) Let's go to the Inbox and verify that our messages have shown up. Here are two messages, both labelled as Yahoo.

13) If we view the Yahoo label, they'll show up there, as well.

14) Now, we'll check that our Contacts have shown up. Here they are. You should note that any contacts that are already in Gmail when the import occurs will not have duplicate entries created.

15) To dismiss the Import complete message, click Hide.

This completes the tutorial. You now know how to import mail and contacts from another email account into Gmail.