Moving from yahoo mail to gmail

[superboyac]

I, as many of you, have several email addresses.  I have one yahoo address that I've used for ages simply for spam and for all those signup things you run into constantly on the internet.  I would like to move this to a gmail account as painlessly as possible.  If any of you have interesting recommendations for this, let me know.  Of course, the reason for this is because gmail is so much better than yahoo (duh) and it allows for POP access so I can use my client to check it.
Here are my thoughts so far:

--I realize I will have to change one by one all the registered sites where I've used the yahoo address.  That is the most painful part.  Or I can pay yahoo to use mail forwarding, but that defeats the purpose because if I wanted to pay them, I could just use their pop access anyway.

--I ran across a blog somewhere that suggested I buy a forwarding address so nothing like this happens again.  So let's say I buy [email protected] as a forward for any free service I use whether it's yahoo or gmail, then I never have to worry again about this stuff.  That's fine, but I don't want to pay for a spam address.  And, I know it's not 100%, but I'm not that worried about google stopping their free service.  If they do, many, many people will be pissed.  Besides, I already use a paid service for my important account.

So that's what I'm thinking.  Advice anyone?

[nosh]

I personally hate Yahoo! Mail (not so much because of the functionality but for their evil step-mother approach towards free users -  deleting the inbox after a period of inactivity, for instance.)

So, I would probably just manually migrate my mailing lists to gmail. It would have the added benefit of dropping some of the less used subscriptions. If you want to use POP with Yahoo there's always YPOPs which has been around... I dunno... forever? I haven't tried it but I assume that means it works.

[housetier]

1.) Make a backup
2.) Make a backup that actually works

Now if you have been using yahoomail for a while, it will take a while to move to a different webmail provider. While you are at it, why not get your own emailserver, so you'll never have to deal with providers deleting your inbox when you dont log in over a period of time? Also you are less likely to be in a situation where a provider goes out of business or changes their business plan and suddenly charges you (more than before).

No way will be easy, but I think using your own mailserver can give you some benefits. I am sure there a some nice people here on DC that would help you setting one up

[superboyac]

erm...forgive my ignorance, but how do I get my own email server?  It sounds expensive.  If you point me in the right direction, I'll give it a go.

[Shades]

There are quite a lot of them, depending on your knowledge they can be free (open source) or shareware.
From the top of my head:
XMail (windows - open source) seems to have improved itself a lot lately.
VPop3 (windows - shareware) is a very good one (from personal experience in the days that I was an sysadmin).

Of course, I forget a lot of other good candidates, but this comment is all I have time for right now. Sorry

[lanux128]

you can take advantage of this offer to get POP access for your account then you could import the mails from within gmail.


• Yahoo! Delivers

[Deozaan]

1) Buy your own domain and hosting service for cheap from some hosting company like Dreamhost.
2) Use Dreamhost (or whatever your host is) to set up an unlimited number of forward-only e-mails (that forward to your Gmail account) for any website that asks for one. i.e. donationcoder @ ac.com or flickr @ac.com, paypal@ ac.com etc. Basically, I just use the website name as the part before the @.
3) If you ever start to get spam, simply delete your [spammywebsite]@ac.com e-mail account.
4) Enjoy a simple life virtually without any spam.

It has worked great for me so far. I've had a Gmail account since May 2005 and to this day I probably get less than 15 spams per year on it. And I've actually never had to delete any e-mail addresses so far.

What's great is that I have about 145 forward-only e-mail addresses that all go to my Gmail account. If anybody anywhere asks for my e-mail address, I just make one up and remember to create it later. That way nobody ever gets my personal e-mail address and I can mass-edit the forward-to address so I'll never have to tell anybody if I change my address. They can just keep using the same one and it will forward to the correct address.

[superboyac]

Hmm...I like the idea Deozaan.  But it seems like a lot of work.  I don't know.  I already have like 5 accounts for various things.  I'm fine with using one permanently for spam stuff as long as it is all coming into my client.  Let me think about all this.  I've already been tweaking my file/folder organization methods because of mouser, and it's taking a long time for me to setup and get used to.  i don't know if i can handle changing the way I do email right now.  Too much!!

[cmpm]

I use poppeeper for both gmail and yahoo.
Don't have to deal with their interfaces at all.
And it works with yahoo free email.

http://www.poppeeper.com/

[gorinw13]

Fastest and Best free solution for 1 time used email addresses, to avoid spams, is:

http://www.spambox.us/

you create a temporary address, and for instance, you signup for a forum that you will use for one time, and this temporary email address destroys itself after a specified time. You can use it anywhere that you will need to use the email address only one time and will no longer use.

It takes a few seconds to create the disposable email address....

Find out more similar services here:

http://email.about.c...es/tp/disposable.htm

[superboyac]

By the way, you can get yahoo pop/forward access for free with this secret workaround.  Pretty cool!