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Migrating from Google Gmail.com to Microsoft Outlook.com
daddydave:
Popping my head in...
Slightly off topic, but I didn't appreciate how complicated it was to migrate a Gmail account to another Gmail account until I had to change my email address. Found out that Google Takeout and IMAP didn't really work as well as I expected. Google really ought to make a Gmail-to-Gmail migration tool to make it beneficial to stay with Gmail when changing addresses. Worse, all the neat little Google services like Google Drive/Finance/Play/Maps/Google+ have their own little quirks and where a move-to-new-account tool was provided, it was always incomplete. I really wanted to keep my existing Google account and just change my email address, although in retrospect that was naïveté on my part. I would have even paid for an all-in-one tool to do that, that's what I did with Evernote I became a premium user for a month, it was something like $5, and then I had enough bandwidth to import my .enex file representing all my data into new account.
TaoPhoenix:
From another angle, do we have any info about the content mining practices of Microsoft? To me this is a new wrinkle in the "meme".
To me the whole Google-Microsoft thing is a Scylla and Charybdis mess. (Greek Myth reference here at Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Scylla_and_Charybdis )
Weren't we all grumpy about the ails of Outlook the local program back in the day? So Gmail is good ol' Gmail, "now with more spying." So what's preventing Microsoft from pulling something sneaky? There aren't many more places to go. We just saw Yahoo get Fubar'ed for *three days* this week, and they're far from great. I have only stuck with them in this amused sense of "they're (NOT-Google) and (NOT-Microsoft)." I don't know of any serious 4th entrants to the party. (And even then I don't think I'd trust them to be around for X more years per se - too many smaller projects finally running into the ground! Yikes)
Remember, this is MS of the Windows 8-series fame. And some rumblings about other fresh lock-in tendrils.
wraith808:
the "Import email accounts" doesnt exist here yet. So definitely not fully rolled out yet - will wait for this and try it out then.
-tomos (December 12, 2013, 07:21 AM)
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I wonder if it is rolling out to users in waves. My account does have it.
IainB:
...I didn't appreciate how complicated it was to migrate a Gmail account to another Gmail account until I had to change my email address ...
-daddydave (December 12, 2013, 12:39 PM)
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I'm curious - why did you "have to" change your email address? :tellme:
(I don't see why one would ever have to abandon an email address, unless it wasn't your personal one in the first place - e.g., under a corporate email domain name.)
You are spot on about the difficulty of migrating one Gmail account to another though. Ages back, I set up a duplicate "[name][email protected]" email account to mirror my usual Gmail account. It was far from satisfactory. I ended up using a Google Group as a backup. That worked rather well and also meant that when I wanted to access or reply to my Gmail from within a corporate domain that blocked personal Gmail usage, I could always get at my Gmail as it was via the medium of a discussion group (which aren't usually blocked by network security access control).
tomos:
Weren't we all grumpy about the ails of Outlook the local program back in the day? So Gmail is good ol' Gmail, "now with more spying." So what's preventing Microsoft from pulling something sneaky?
-TaoPhoenix (December 12, 2013, 01:12 PM)
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Yes, part of the paid version of Outlook.com is that it's "ad-free". So I kind of presume it's there already (but havent looked at the T&C).
[edit] Ed Bott says: "There’s no such thing as a free lunch, of course. The web version of Outlook.com includes unobtrusive ads that appear to the right of the main email window. Those ads are not context-sensitive: the advertising engine does not use the contents of the current message or other messages in your mailbox to determine which ads to display, as Gmail does. Incoming and outgoing messages do not include ads." link [/edit]
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