I recently tested Google's new import tool to move all of your e-mail from your current e-mail provider to start using Gmail. I have been thinking about moving over to Gmail as my primary account, but I wasn't sure. I decided to see how the new import tool worked.
To start, I created a dummy Gmail account since the feature doesn't yet work with existing Gmail accounts, and besides I wanted to test it out anyways.
After creating my account, I had 3 e-mails in my Inbox which is definitely new as usually there is only 1 e-mail. One of them had instructions on importing my e-mails from other accounts.
To get started, I went to my settings and found the "Accounts and Import" tab (used to be just the "Accounts" tab) and found the button to import my old mail.
It took me through a pretty simple process of entering my e-mail address and password to access the old mail.
It then gave me some options for how I wanted my e-mails to be imported. I changed the tag from my e-mail address to say hotmail, but other than that I just left everything default.
Once I clicked the import button, I got the following screen that said I would need to wait for up to 2 days.
I went to bed and in the morning when I loaded Gmail back up, all of my e-mails had been moved over along with my contacts.
Well, almost all of my e-mails. Actually it looks like they are slowly pulling over all of the e-mails. And I mean slowly. It has now been more than a week since I signed up for the service and I still don't even have half of my e-mails moved over. Another issue that I found was that different languages don't seem to import correctly. Here is an example of what I am talking about.
Yes, that is Russian to me too :).
Overall, I think there is still some work to do before using this tool. Specifically, I think the overall time to import e-mails needs to be decreased significantly. Secondly, they need to figure out how to import e-mails in all languages. Since I have a lot of Russian e-mails, this is a problem. I think that this is an awesome idea though and once again, props to Google for another great idea. I am sure the kinks will work themselves out over the next couple of months.
