How to Switch from Yahoo! to Gmail

I’ve found a couple of ways to move at Yahoo! email account to Gmail, but I think this is the easiest.

  1. Buy Yahoo! Mail Plus. It’ll cost you $19.95 but the POP3 access and email forwarding are essential.
  2. Move all of the email that you’d like to transfer to your Gmail account into your Yahoo! inbox.
  3. Set up Gmail to grab your messages from Yahoo! using POP (Settings → Accounts → Get mail from other accounts)
  4. Sit back and relax as Gmail downloads all your messages.

If you’re concerned about the potential for losing email in the mix, you can tell Gmail to leave copies when you configure the POP access to Yahoo!

If you’d like to continue sending email from your Yahoo! address you can configure that in Gmail under Settings → Accounts → Send mail as. Note that for some reason (spam control?) Gmail puts your Gmail address in the Sender header and your Yahoo! address in the From header, causing recipients using Microsoft Outlook to see a message like “Sent by username@gmail.com on behalf of username@yahoo.com.”