I'm considering transitioning to gmail and wanted to get perspectives of members who have done this.
We currently use our internet provider's email address (probably for the last 10 years or more).... so we are tied to that internet provider to some extent. While we have been happy with their service and their cost is reasonable compared to alternatives, I want to be prepared in case a better alternative comes along so we can change without having to scramble to a new email domain and can do it leisurely now. We use Outlook on our laptops and prefer outlook to the internet provider's clunky web mail site.
We also both have android phones and currently have to sync addresses, calendars, etc. via a tether and I don't do it religiously and frequently find my address book is out of date. As I understand it, if we transition our address book, calendar and email to gmail then the synchronization of our laptops, tablets and cellphones is seamless since they all attach to the cloud. Is that correct?
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?
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.
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?
I would appreciate any input from others who have made the transition.
You may also want to think about using a service like Pobox Lifetime Email - Mailboxes, Email Forwarding, Spam Protection and Personal Domains for a cost of $20/year you will have an email address that you can use for any service (I have had my email for about 20 years now, and several email providers) It is basically a mail forwarding service, you can set it to forward to any email provider you like.
Definitely use that account for calendar and other instances you want both to see emails.
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!
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...
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.)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?
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.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.
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.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?
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 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.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 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.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.
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.For the worry about "the cloud". The term "the cloud" is just jargon for a server that can be accessed from multiple locations...
+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.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.