NETWORK SOLUTION TIPS: Microsoft’s Guide For Gmail Users To Switch To Hotmail

Google recently revealed the plan to merge the privacy policies and terms of service for most of the company’s products. This move gives all Google services direct access to all user data. Google search for instance can take into account what kind of emails a user gets in Gmail to personalize the search results based on that. This even goes further for Android phone users, who may now reveal their favorite restaurants, shops and locations to all other Google services.

A new post by Microsoft employee Dharmesh Mehta on the Inside Windows Live blog highlights core reasons why users might want to switch from Gmail to Hotmail, before explaining the actual steps that migrates their email account to the Hotmail email service.

Hotmail & Facebook work well together. You can update your Facebook status, chat with Facebook friends, view their updates, and comment right from your Hotmail inbox. You can’t do this from Gmail.

You can easily share lots of photos and large attachments. Hotmail lets you share hundreds of photos or other files in one message using the integrated online storage from SkyDrive. You can’t do this in Gmail.

Hotmail works great with Office. Using the Office Web Apps, Hotmail lets you view and edit Office docs for free right in your inbox. Gmail doesn’t work well with Office.

Hotmail lets you get a handle on graymail. With customizable categories and scheduled sweeps, you can quickly clean up things like newsletters, social updates, and daily deals so you only see the mail that really matters to you. Gmail doesn’t have Sweep.

These features alone won’t convince many users to move their email account to Hotmail. Combined with Google’s announcement however they could be enough to get some users to move their accounts.

It needs to be noted though that Gmail offers features that Hotmail does not offer. This includes IMAP support or two step authentication, both of which are not supported by Hotmail.

The guide to switch from Gmail to Hotmail lists three steps.

Create a Hotmail account. If you don’t already have one, you need to create a Hotmail account. The best way to do this is to get a new emailaddress either @hotmail.com or @live.com. Or, if you already have an email address you want to keep using, you can keep using it and sign up here. You don’t have to use our domain.

Import your old messages from Gmail. You’ll probably want to keep your old email and contacts so we’ve made it simple to bring them in.TrueSwitch is an easy tool which will import your email and contacts and forward any new email to Hotmail for 90 days. Go to the TrueSwitch site and follow the steps there. When you sign back in to Hotmail, you’ll notice that it’s beginning to import your emails (this could take a few hours if you have a lot of emails to bring over).

Connect your Gmail account. This step is optional, but if you want to make sure you receive future messages from Gmail, you can have Hotmail automatically get all new emails that are sent to your old Gmail account. These are the steps to connect your accounts:
a. In your inbox, click Options and then More options.
b. Click Sending/receiving email from other accounts.
c. Click Add an email account.
d. Provide your Gmail account details.

Step 2 and 3 address core issues that users who move mail accounts want resolved before they even start thinking about it. Access to all previous mail messages and the forwarding of messages that are send to the old account are covered in those two steps.