Back in the Spring of 1997 I finally grew tired of using Juno as my email client. Back then it was a simple program that would use a dial-up connection to download your emails off of its server. The application was ad-supported and had a limitation of about 2 MBs. The problem with it was I could only access it at my home computer. I wanted a solution that would allow me to access my email anywhere. This is where HoTMaiL came in. It provided the solution I needed and was easy to sign-up for. I stuck with it after Microsoft bought and I have been through all iterations of it.
Granted, for the last several years I have not given out my @hotmail.com address. Instead I have had my account set up to receive and send the email address for this site. The only thing that gave away to the average user that I was even using Hotmail was I was using an "i'm MAKING A DIFFERENCE" link in my signature. Otherwise, most people never realized I was still using Hotmail as my email backbone so to speak. For some reason I have started to grow tired of the service and decided to look in to transition into using only Gmail. First, I needed to edit all of my old subscriptions that were being sent to my Hotmail address and change them to email address for this domain. That has been a task in progress for a couple of months. It is not a particularly time-consuming process, but I had mailings I got very infrequently and I used these as reminders to go to the list and change my address.
Now that I had everything switched over to my real email address I started looking in to what I needed to do to dump all of my Hotmail messages. I had assumed that I was going to have dump my messages and use an email program to copy all my messages to my Gmail account. I could have saved myself some time if I would have just gone in to my Gmail account from the start. I was pleasantly surprised that Gmail could import all my data from my Hotmail account. Once the process started I was even more pleasantly surprised to see that Gmail automatically tagged all my messages based on the folder I had them in on my Hotmail account. Also, since the Gmail BlackBerry plug-in has been created using Gmail on my phone is easier than it was the first time I tried it over a year ago.
So far the only messages I am getting at my Hotmail account are Spam. Gmail has been smart enough not to import these so far. It will be a little while before I delete my Hotmail account (if ever), but if Gmail ends up working the way I think it will then it is quite likely my Hotmail account will end up getting deleted from non-use. It's been a good run Hotmail. I'll always have soft spot for you, but don't expect me back.