Switching from GMail to Windows Live Mail

I canceled my Google account & services today. Google’s slick, but after a 6-month self-inflicted trial, staying away from all Google services entirely, and a much longer trial for search, I find no strong reason I’d choose Google over Windows Live services. It’s marketing and buzz, not functionality. My alternative in case I get screwed will be Yahoo (I’m there for Flickr and Pipes), and I’m keeping an eye out for new services.

I’ve been meaning to write up step-by-step instructions to switch from GMail to Windows Live Mail/Hotmail… this is an area I think people believe has significant switching cost, but it doesn’t, especially if you’re investing in portability in the first place:

1. I’d previously set up waded.org’s MX record to point at GMail’s servers, and before that, my own SMTP/POP server. So the first thing I did to switch is to change the MX record to point at Hotmail’s servers. You wouldn’t go back to when your cell phone number wouldn’t port between wireless providers, would you? Similarly, it’s worth keeping a domain registered and MX under your control to have ultimate control over your email address.  (And you may pay more annually to your cell provider for that capability than you do for domain registration.)  Basically, don’t use use @gmail.com, @live.com, or @hotmail.com email addresses if you value portability.
2. Made sure your Live ID & Google account time zones are set correctly. If they are not, you’ll end up with odd sent/received times on your transferred messages.
3. Create a new POP account in Windows Live Mail desktop client (WLMD) using Gmail’s info… let’s call it “G.” Configure your GMail account to POP all mail. Send/Receive in WLMD and go to lunch. (I remember running into POP throttling behavior here… I just hit Send/Receive again and again until I was getting 0 messages. I think I ate lunch in front of the computer until all the email was downloaded.)
4. GMail includes sent mail as well as received mail in POP, so both classes of mail end up in the “G” Inbox. in WLMD I created a new folder under “G” called “Sent By Me”, and created a rule to move all mail -from- myself to that folder, and ran the rule.
5. I copy/pasted all mail in the “G” Inbox to my Hotmail Inbox. I copied the mail from the “G” “Sent By Me” into the Hotmail “Sent Items” folder. The mail all merged nicely. Moving this much mail (3000+ messages?) made WLMD freeze up for a while, but I waited it out.
6. Keep your GMail account for a while to make sure everything’s OK!
7. I remember noticing it took a day or so for search to work correctly in WLMD and at https://mail.live.com… indexing takes time… so don’t expect to be able to try search functionality out right away. For new messages you’ll be able to search instantaneously.
8. Hotmail flagged some of my good mail as junk… whitelists, blacklists, & whatever the service learns about your email ARE lost in this transition, but measuring the value of that’s pretty hard. After I marked some of the junk as non-junk, I haven’t had any more issues with junk mail than I did with GMail.

(Remember, all this is my personal opinion, not that of the hive. Also, these notes are pretty old… it’d be nice if someone who tries the notes could write up more formal, modern steps.)