Bringing over emails (Part 3 of 3): Hotmail emails into Gmail

Recently, the Gmail Help Community has received quite a few queries on this topic involving AOL, Yahoo!, and Outlook accounts. As an attempt towards making the users more comfortable by incorporating all the screenshots, this three-part blog aims to explore the three inbuilt Gmail processes through which one can bring over emails from another account over to a Gmail account. Following the first two parts where we looked at how to bring over emails from AOL and Yahoo! accounts, we now look at how we can bring over emails from a Hotmail account in this final part of the blog.

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Gmail includes the following ways to bring over emails from other service providers:

1. The POP3 fetch.
2. Gmailify (using the IMAP protocol).
3. Import (using the ShuttleCloud API).

The test Hotmail account, like my test AOL and Yahoo! accounts, has 2-step verification enabled. 

If you want to enable 2-step verification for your Hotmail account, you can do that by following the suggestions included in this help article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-in/help/12408/microsoft-account-how-to-use-two-step-verification. 

If you also want to enable 2-step verification for your Gmail account, you can do that through the suggestions mentioned in this help article: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185839?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en&oco=0.

We shall first look at bringing over emails via POP3, then check out Gmailify (which uses IMAP) and finally explore the Import process (managed by the ShuttleCloud API).

The POP3 process begins with a click on the Add an email account link and then entering the Hotmail email address in the following screen.

I entered my regular password for testing and received this error message.

Thereafter, I generated and entered an application-specific password (details included here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-in/help/12409/microsoft-account-app-passwords-and-two-step-verification) which was accepted.

If you do not wish to add the Hotmail account as a "Send mail as" option in your Gmail account, you should select the No option and finish the setup process at this point. 

Selecting Yes and clicking on the Next button will bring up the screen below with options to enter the name on the outgoing emails, whether to treat the Hotmail account as an alias of the Gmail account, and whether to specify a different reply-to address or not.

Note: 

1. If you are not familiar with the "Treat as an alias" option, review this Google help article - https://support.google.com/a/answer/1710338?hl=en. Personally, I prefer to keep that box unchecked unless I want that for a very specific reason.
2. To know more about the "Reply-to" address, refer to this Gmail article - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en.

Clicking on the Next Step button brings up the screen to set up the Hotmail SMTP server. The password is the same one that was entered for the POP3 server. 

Note: I noticed the Port number defaulted to 25. So, I changed it to 587 (TLS). More info on the Gmail SMTP server can be found here: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229?hl=en.

Clicking on the Add Account button now displays the Confirmation verification window. All that needs to be done is to look up the email sent by the "Gmail Team" titled "Gmail Confirmation - Send Mail as username@hotmail.com" to the Hotmail address and containing the 9-digit confirmation code.

After either clicking the verification link in the email or entering the code in the box and clicking on the Verify button in the window above, we can now see the Hotmail account added as both Check email from and Send mail as options.

To look at the Gmailify process for the Hotmail account, we go back to the window where we are asked to choose between Gmailify and POP3.

Clicking on the Next button brings up two Microsoft pages. One for the password and the other to indicate our preference to remain signed-in or not.

Those done, the process is deemed complete and we are shown the confirmation message.

We can now check that the Hotmail account has been linked to the Gmail account via Gmailify and also added as a "Send mail as" option.

This leaves us to explore the import process.

Clicking on the Import mail and contacts link opens up a pop-up window where we enter the Hotmail email address.

The next screen includes some relevant information related to the import process which is enclosed within the red rectangle. Once read, click on the Continue button.

If you are not signed in to your Microsoft (Hotmail account in this case), you will be asked to complete the sign-in procedure. Since I have 2-step verification enabled on the account, I was asked to enter the username, password, and the 2-step verification code.

Then the authentication successful screen appears.

Returning back to the original pop-up window, we select the Import options and then click on the Start Import button.

And we are done! The final screen informs us that the import process has begun and it may take some time for it to complete, during which we can monitor the progress by visiting the Gmail settings Accounts and Import tab.

Closing that pop-up window, we can now see the Hotmail address added under the Import mail and contacts section as well as a "Send mail as" option.

With this, we come to the conclusion of the three-part blog on how to bring over emails from the common web-based email service providers, AOL, Yahoo!, and Hotmail using the three in-house processes POP3, Gmailify, and Import. If you want me to include any other scenarios, please let me know in the comments section and I shall be happy to enhance this article.