Transition to gmail

[Tadpole]

We left MSN and went to Comcast years ago. My MSN and Hotmail accounts still work and still are free. Are you sure that if you leave your current ISP you can't keep your email and login?

[savory]

I may have missed something but from my review, I think this is the best advice.

Some people suggested setting up your own domain, I would recommend against that. If you goal is to share calendars, documents, music, etc. you can do that with 'linking' gmail address. In fact, I had to set up a gmail address the other day in order to share Google Play because I could not share on my domain name with my gmail family members.

As for cloud security, they (hackers) already have your SS and everyting else in my opinion. I know they have mine and millions others with the gov't hack. I think my best protection is that they have millions of them

Quote:

Originally Posted by kiki I've been using gmail since 2005, transitioning from hotmail. I also helped others in my family migrate away from ISP e-mail for two reasons: I might want to switch ISPs and I trust Google with my data more than an ISP. So yes, moving over to Google makes lots of sense to me. Most of your data is already out there anyways. My only concern with Google is that they really do know everything about me. I get e-mail confirmations for everything. They probably know more about me than I do. But I came to terms with that a long time ago. The convenience of Google is worth it. I'm a Mac/iOS user and use Google for everything. When I originally migrated, I setup forwarding on my hotmail account to send everything to gmail. It probably took about a year before most of my contacts started sending e-mail to my gmail account and even longer for all of them. With other forms of communication though, it's become less of an issue. The biggest benefit of Gmail is that you can archive all of your e-mails. I still delete the worthless e-mails, but being able to archive is nice. Plus, I imported all of my previous e-mails from hotmail. After 10 years, I'm only using 20% of my 15GB allocation, so space hasn't been an issue for me. If you're storing your e-mails locally, then I'm sure you could also import them into gmail (I'd do this with using a tag for imported emails). I'm not sure that I would follow your plan exactly. First I would figure out what type of forwarding services your ISP offers. If all you can do is forward your e-mail to your gmail account, then I would set that up. Then I'd setup up a label in gmail to label all of your ISP e-mails so you can see what is forwarded to gmail. This will also tell you how many e-mails you're still receiving from your ISP. That's a nice benefit, since after 6 months, you can then see who's still using your ISP e-mail address. Then I'd go ahead and notify everybody and starting changing your e-mail address on all your accounts to point to your gmail account. I probably wouldn't delete the ISP address until you have to. There's really no harm in keeping it around. As for viewing your e-mail, you should configure your gmail account to use IMAP, which is how all of your devices should pull your e-mail. I don't use Outlook, so I'm not sure if you can distinguish between archive and delete. Using my iOS devices, I'm able to either delete or archive e-mail in my gmail account and I use the web browser for viewing e-mails on the Mac. I would hope that Outlook supports the same, but based on my past history with MS, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't (but they are getting better, so maybe this has changed?). The other thing I've done on my iOS devices is to make sure I only have one calendar, contact list, etc, provider specified in my settings. I looked at my wife's phone the other day and her contact list is a mess. This is because she has it sync'ing between three different providers. Even with Google, I still need to go through the contact list occasionally and clean it up, but it's a lot easier to do if all of your contacts are in one place. Since you're already on Android, this might be less of an issue (no iCloud to deal with). Also, make sure to enable two-factor authentication on your gmail account. This is probably the most important account your have, since with it, you can reset passwords, etc, from any other site. Make sure to keep it safe. Btw, you didn't mention it, but another benefit is Google Docs/Drive. I migrated away from Excel many years ago and Google's version works well, with the benefit of being able to access all of your data on all of your devices. The biggest benefit over Excel was the GoogleFinance function, which lets you easily get stock data into your spreadsheet (why does Excel make this so hard?). Good luck with the transition!

[Lsbcal]

I split my email choices:

Outlook with Comcast email: for financial institution emails

Yahoo mail: for a lot of daily stuff
Yahoo mail (2nd account): for those signups I think I'll get a lot of junk email on

Gmail: currently for ER.org and Bogleheads thread emails

[target2019]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Janet H A google calendar can be configured so that multiple folks (with various/unique e-mail addresses) can view or edit. There is no need to share an e-mail address simply for calendar use...

That is true. But it is simpler to have one and not need to share anything. As you add more Gmail accounts the situation is more flexible and more complicated.

I also know that some have an inability to grasp complexity, or maybe they shy away from it.

[tulak]

Having multiple accounts made me think of the additional gmail account I use for traveling. If I lose everything while traveling, smartphone, ipad, passports, then this is an account that I can login to from a public computer to get access to copies of my passport (stored on Google drive) along with all my itineraries and airline/hotel reservations (I forward them to this e-mail address).

This account doesn't have two factor authentication enabled and uses a simpler password that both my wife I can easily remember. This beats having to carry copies of your passport (which you can lose) and if we're ever forced to login from a public location, then I can easily change the password when I get back home. And even if somebody does get into this account, there's really not much there of interest. It sure beats having to potentially login to my regular gmail account. Especially since that might not work because I wouldn't be able to get past two-factor authentication if I don't have access to any of my devices.

[bUU]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pb4uski I'm somewhat leery of having my email, calendar and address book in the cloud, but OTOH my email is currently on my internet provider's servers so perhaps that is not a huge difference. Any thoughts on that?

It is a critical aspect of the decision that a lot of folks overlook. Such folks think that the email magically appears in their email client (probably Outlook) and from then on it is only on their computer, but the default now for configuring email is to set up an IMAP connection, which means the email remains on the server until you delete it or remove it (i.e., by moving it from the OST file to a PST file, in the case of Outlook - gobbledygook that most folks don't grok.)

We don't keep our email in the cloud. We receive email, read it, and then disposition it into a folder in a mail archive on our hard drives. That, combined with the need to add, update and remove calendar entries and address book entries on our Android phones, ties us tightly to Microsoft Outlook with our calendars and address books on Outlook.com, as there isn't another Microsoft Windows email, calendar and address book application that is as well done and feature rich as Outlook.

While using the Microsoft Windows Outlook application doesn't preclude us from getting our mail from elsewhere, it does make it unwise to locate our calendars and address books anywhere other than Outlook.com. We don't want to come to depend on what I have found to be often-unreliable synching add-ons. We had a enough of that nonsense in the past.

We chose to go with Outlook.com rather than Google/Gmail. As I mentioned, this was because of the superiority of the Microsoft Windows Outlook application and our antipathy for synching add-ons, such as Google Apps Sync. I've used both Outlook.com (for personal matters) and Google/Gmail (for church matters) and in terms of quality of service, capabilities, etc., there's no appreciable advantage to Google/Gmail. In terms of the online experience, I find the Outlook.com experience far superior to the Google/Gmail experience for email and address book, and on par with the Google Calendar experience.

In terms of the Android experience, the Outlook Android app is far superior. While Android phones come already pre-configured to work with the Google apps and you have to install and configure the Outlook Android app yourself, it is all three tools (email, calendar and address book) in one app, and it is far superior in terms of usability, reliability, and most notably compatibility: I sometimes receive email today that I can view in the Outlook app for which within the Gmail app all I see are the headers.

We have some special circumstances (a vanity domain name) which makes things a bit more complicated for us, but don't affect your situation so I won't go into them.

Quote:

Originally Posted by pb4uski My plan would be to 1) send out a broadcast email to all my contacts informing them of the new email address, 2) set up my current email to forward all mail to my gmail account and send a vacation message informing senders of the new email address, 3) set up Outlook so it pulls from both my current email account and my gmail account and 4) over time change my email address with all our vendors and 5) at some point, perhaps in 6 months or so, kill off my internet email account.

The devil is in the details of course. If you only ever interact with email, calendars and address books within Microsoft Outlook on Microsoft Windows, then things are easy. I'd suggest you leave your legacy Internet email account intact until you have to give it up (i.e., when you move and have to switch to a new service provider) since there is no downside to just leaving it be, giving your contacts that much longer to switch to your new email address.

However, if you start wanting to interact with your email online (such as when you're at a friend's home or at an airport kiosk) or through your smartphone, the decisions become more critical. You'll want to make sure you're happy with the user experience you'll have through these other platforms with whatever decision you make.

Quote:

Originally Posted by pb4uski So at the end I would have my gmail email account with my address book and calendar and email and it would seamlessly sync my laptop, tablet and cellphone and we could change internet service providers easily. Make sense?

As you may have gathered above, I don't consider Google App Sync to be of sufficient quality, and I have specific problems viewing certain email in the Gmail Android client. However, if it serves your needs better than what I consider Outlook's more seamless and higher quality capabilities, then surely go with Google.

[Ronstar]

I set up a gmail account about 6 months ago when I was unhappy with my Comcast email (I can't send Comcast email from my Ipad email app sometimes). I haven't broadcasted the gmail address to all contacts yet - I wanted to test gmail out first. Now that it seems to fit my needs, I'll begin transferring everything form Comcast to gmail. Gmail works well here on my macs, iPhone and iPad. No complaints.

[Dawg52]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jackanory I transitioned to yahoo back in 2002, when using outlook often meant one would get any virus going. I've switched ISP's a number of times since then and always maintained my yahoo address. Oh, and I very rarely see spam, unless I open up the spam folder!

I've used yahoo emailing for years and haven't had problems. Use yahoo calendar as well. I do have a gmail email address for some correspondence. Works well too.

[donheff]

I got part way through and got exhausted. So, in case no one else mentioned it, your worries about storing information in the cloud may be irrelevant. I believe most ISP accounts (Verizon, Comcast, etc) default to an IMAP server set to retain the original message unless deleted. In that case your messages are in the cloud (and, of course get all the benefits of backup should your personal computer get destroyed). Gmail is no different in that regard. Using Outlook generally doesn't change this. Some people have their accounts set to download the message and concurrently delete it from the server but that seems short sighted to me. In my experience most people who do that don't even realize that is their setup -- they find out when they lose their inbox and folders.

[zedd]

I moved away from an ISP-sponsored email address to gmail many years ago. No regrets.

Maybe it's been mentioned already but you could personalize your gmail email address by purchasing a domain name and tying it into gmail. Hence you wouldn't be stuck with an email address of johndoe7846@gmail.com but could personalize it as something like bigDog@pb4uski.com

In fact you could configure it to have a multitude of email addresses resolve to bigDog@pb4uski.com I find this useful for sites that insist on using an email address as a username.

It's been a long time since I set it up, so would need to google the how-to.

fwiw: There are a bunch of email apps and clients. I access gmail simply via my browser.

I think I'm paying something like $10 a year for my domain name. Shop around.

[bingybear]

Quote:

Originally Posted by SteveNU I had the same concern about having to change our email addresses every time we changed providers. What I did was to get my own domain name and use that as our email address for many years. My wife is definitely technically challenged though and would have no idea what to do if her tech support suddenly keeled over. So I moved everything to gmail, our email, contacts and calendar. It is working out fine. I do exactly what you are considering with outlook and pull all of our email into it. That way you can feel confident that you are not missing anything important and eventually you will get everything changed over and nothing will come to your old address except spam! The biggest problem I have now is the fact that we both have gmail addresses and accounts and you have to be careful to set up your individual devices to only sync to a common contact list and calendar while separating the email. We use my account to keep our contacts and calendar in and keep our email separate but it does sometimes get confused. I have been considering setting up just one common account for us and using labels to sort the incoming email somehow. That would simplify things considerably and make life a lot easier. Get a new device and just sign into the account and sync everything and your done. No need to try and figure out what goes where etc. Like I said if I keel over or lose my mind everything would get messed up pretty quick and she would have no idea.

I must be wired differently than you. We have moved off providers email long ago for the reasons noted. But I approached this differently. We both already had gmail accounts, so no real need to combine theses accounts as the email is already sorted. Calendars, we keep 3 at present: one for me (green), one for DW (blue) and one for DMIL (red). All 3 calendars are shared between me and DW. If an event covers both of us I will usually send an invite to DW so it is on both calendars. DMIL calendar is for events that involve DMIL that we are part of .... like taking her to medical appointments. There have been times that her calendar is busier than ours. The multiple calendars are great since we can look and see from color what is going on with both of us and when DMIL needs us. We usually choose which one helps DMIL as the events happen, not when they are put on the calendar.
For contacts, we each have our own list. Many of the contacts are similar, but some are not. I have many more from old w*!k friends that I still keep in contact and periodically get together. So having our own contact list seem right for us. -- note.... doing thing differently does not indicate better or worse... just different.

OP - While there are some differences with gmail and a pop server, I would not get all hung up with "the change". Not that I use it this way, you could have you email downloaded to outlook (I use thunderbird) and have gmail delete it after download (that is if you have concerns about leaving it in the cloud). However, if you leave it on gmail.. you can get to old emails on the phone.

[rodi]

For the worry about "the cloud". The term "the cloud" is just jargon for a server that can be accessed from multiple locations... It comes from old marketing diagrams where they'd show some buildings and houses - all with arrows going up/down to a picture of a cloud showing you could access from anywhere.


I've had my yahoo address since 98 or 99- maybe earlier..... The address even uses my maiden name - and I've been married over 16 years. I moved to yahoo for the reasons stated by many here - to not be tied to an internet provider, since that changes when you move... It was also convenient for travel. Gmail didn't exist when I signed up.

I also have a gmail address - I'm fully in the android infrastructure - so it's much more convenient to have a gmail account to link all this stuff - transfer to new devices, etc.

Our family shares a calendar. When I set up the phones (android) for myself and my boys, I set the default calendar to link to my gmail address. We all share that calendar. It's kind of funny if a notice goes off - and all the devices chirp at once.

I also like some other google apps that tie into the google gmail infrastructure - for example Google Keep - much simpler and less of a memory hog than evernote. I use it for shopping lists, notes, anytime I need to capture something. Again - it can be shared - so my husband adds to my grocery list from his phone.

[bUU]

Quote:

Originally Posted by zedd Maybe it's been mentioned already but you could personalize your gmail email address by purchasing a domain name and tying it into gmail. Hence you wouldn't be stuck with an email address of johndoe7846@gmail.com but could personalize it as something like bigDog@pb4uski.com In fact you could configure it to have a multitude of email addresses resolve to bigDog@pb4uski.com I find this useful for sites that insist on using an email address as a username.

I use that approach mostly as a means of controlling spam. Every place that asks for my email address gets a separate email address that all end up in my Inbox. When it becomes apparent that someplace has sold the email address I gave them to spammers, I simply terminate it. I generally don't create a new email address for the place that sold the email address I gave them to spammers, but rather stop doing business with them. I suppose if it was my bank or something like that, I would scold them for their breach of the agreement not to sell my email to spammers, and create a new email address for them.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rodi For the worry about "the cloud". The term "the cloud" is just jargon for a server that can be accessed from multiple locations...

Of course, but let's be clear about why keeping your email in the cloud is a concern to some folks. If there is a breach of the online system (very unlikely, but possible) whatever personal information that happens to be in your Inbox may be exposed to others. That's a danger no matter what, of course, but if you leave your email in the cloud then it simply means that at any one point in time there is orders of magnitude more personal information of yours subject to the breach.

[target2019]

If one wants to attempt a measurement of risk, there are more factors to consider. Already mention is that email is already retained by every server that the email touched while being sent and received. If you have IMAP, then the mail is retained on the server(s) in another area for your use.

More risk exist for you depending on companies in use, which varies according to their maintenance and security practices.

More risk when the company is a prominent target.

Factor in your own security practices at home or at work. Is your computer at home with gigabytes of old email messages physically secured?

Given the complexity of measuring all risk factors, which are much more extensive than I've mentioned, my first guess has always been that my email is more secure while in gmail than it has been with other ISPs.

[bobandsherry]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Senator Gmail is much better than a static email address tied to your internet provider. You can still use outlook to retrieve emails, just as you do now. Then, switch internet providers at will.

+1 - especially important for those who move someplace new for retirement, like me. I'm with Comcast now, but new home serviced by Bright House. I've been switching over to gmail as primary email for past several months in preparation.

[pb4uski]

I'm overwhelmed by the responses and wanted to provide an update. I decided to do the transition and proceeded. I sent a massive email to my addressbook informing them of the change. Initially I set up gmail to draw messages from my old domain but it was drawing in a lot of old messages so I changed it to not draw messages but set my old domain up to send new messages to gmail.

I'm getting used to the gmail interface and I think I will eventually like it and be totally off Outlook. I really like the way gmail, contacts and calendar integrate together and across my laptop, android phone and andriod tablet. Very handy.

I've been changing email addresses with vendors sporadically... I need to do better there.

Today, I received a message about their new app.. Inbox by Gmail. Has anyone used this instead of gmail? If so, what do you think?

See https://www.google.com/inbox/

[ExFlyBoy5]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pb4uski I'm overwhelmed by the responses and wanted to provide an update. I decided to do the transition and proceeded. I sent a massive email to my addressbook informing them of the change. Initially I set up gmail to draw messages from my old domain but it was drawing in a lot of old messages so I changed it to not draw messages but set my old domain up to send new messages to gmail. I'm getting used to the gmail interface and I think I will eventually like it and be totally off Outlook. I really like the way gmail, contacts and calendar integrate together and across my laptop, android phone and andriod tablet. Very handy. I've been changing email addresses with vendors sporadically... I need to do better there. Today, I received a message about their new app.. Inbox by Gmail. Has anyone used this instead of gmail? If so, what do you think? See https://www.google.com/inbox/

I used "inbox" for about a week when it came out in the lab. I wasn't a big fan of it because of what I would call "clunky" interfaces. It's been a few months, so they have most likely fixed many of the issues I had. It's kind of like Maps...when they changed to the most recent "big change", it was quite a pain to use...now it's easy as pie.

As for your changeover, I am glad to hear that it's going well!

[48Fire]

Thanks for starting this thread. I contemplated this move before we went to our winter home, but there wasn't enough time. This now inspires me to start working this now.

[Meadbh]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pb4uski I'm overwhelmed by the responses and wanted to provide an update. I decided to do the transition and proceeded. I sent a massive email to my addressbook informing them of the change. Initially I set up gmail to draw messages from my old domain but it was drawing in a lot of old messages so I changed it to not draw messages but set my old domain up to send new messages to gmail. I'm getting used to the gmail interface and I think I will eventually like it and be totally off Outlook. I really like the way gmail, contacts and calendar integrate together and across my laptop, android phone and andriod tablet. Very handy. I've been changing email addresses with vendors sporadically... I need to do better there. Today, I received a message about their new app.. Inbox by Gmail. Has anyone used this instead of gmail? If so, what do you think? See https://www.google.com/inbox/

Thanks for the update, pb4uski, glad to know it's going well. As I suspected, you will probably not feel the need to continue with Outlook once you become comfortable with gmail. I did try Inbox, but abandoned it because I have several email accounts for different purposes and I found it annoying to have notifications pop up and cumbersome to trace their origins across three different accounts. But that's just personal preference. I may give Inbox another try.

[pb4uski]

Quote:

Originally Posted by 48Fire Thanks for starting this thread. I contemplated this move before we went to our winter home, but there wasn't enough time. This now inspires me to start working this now.

Actually, our winter rental was the impetus for the change. Our ISP does not allow outgoing mail to be sent from Outlook unless you are connected to their network so while we are away I would need to send outgoing mail through their webmail site, which is clunky and inconvenient.

I could have just continued to use gmail through Outlook but decided to make the jump.