Do not use bad email services!

The following are bad email service providers: 

1. Email from your ISP (Comcast, Telus, MTC Net, etc.)
2. Email from your organization (church, etc.)
3. Email from your company
4. Email from your school (high school, college, university)

These are all bad for the following reasons:

1. When you loose your provider, you will lose email address (and your mail, and anything else that your mail client or your school's mail server stored unless you back them up--if that is even possible).
1. This often happens when you change residences, change schools, or change jobs.  This is a frequent occurrence in most peoples lives (one of these happens every 1-5 years for most people).
2. When you move to a place that your old ISP doesn't have, you may lose all your mail.  You will think this is no big deal until you lose your email.
3. You likely have a small storage capacity on the web, so you have to delete messages off the server constantly, so they aren't available for all your devices.  You will eventually desperately need to get at a message that you deleted
4. The web client is probably terrible, so you have to use POP or SMTP, so you have to go through the hassle of exporting and importing all your mail and contacts every time you get a new computer.
5. Your mail doesn't sync across your devices, so you have some messages on your phone, some on your PC and some on your laptop.  If you read one on your PC, it won't get marked read on any other device.  If you send mail from your PC, you won't be able to see the sent mail on any of your other devices.
6. If your mail client on your PC runs out of a license or isn't compatible with your new computer or new operating system,
7. With most mail clients, you will be downloading viruses to your computer just by opening your mail client and you will be running viruses on your computer just by viewing your mail.

You will think that none of these things will be a problem until they bite you.  I have literally spent weeks of working time fixing people's email problems because they weren't smart about choosing their email provider.  These problems are blatantly obvious to anyone with a shred of common sense.  What isn't so obvious is the solution: Gmail.  But even that is becoming more and more obvious.  This article is my attempt at making it as easy and obvious a solution as possible.

If you give in to the temptation to use these bad mail services, you will probably lose all your mail, your calendar, your contacts, and whatever else you stored in your email client, and you suffer greatly because of it.  So don't give in. Don't use your ISP's email service.  Don't use your school's mail service.  If you have to have your email look like it comes from a non-@gmail.com address, you can use POP pulling and SMTP pushing (described below).  There is NO REASON OR EXCUSE WHATSOEVER to use any of these bad email services.

Hopefully, you are reading this before you lost all your mail.  If that is the case, switch to Gmail now (see below).  Whether that is the case or not, I work on contract for $45/hour and I can work remotely on your PC or laptop no matter where it is in the world.  I can recover your email and/or migrate your email and contacts to Gmail.  Feel free to contact me.

Gmail is better than any other provider

The following are reasons that I encourage people to switch from other webmail services (such as Hotmail) to Gmail:

1. Gmail has enough free storage that you don't have to delete messages.  And it is increasing all the time.
2. Gmail gives you a Google Account with all its benefits:
1. a great calendar (which integrates well with meeting requests) 
2. a document sharing and collaboration solution called Google Docs that is far superior to sending documents by email: you can upload whole folders, edit documents with others simultaneously, use the built-in chat, have "discussions" about the document, and download the document in .doc, PDF, and other formats.  You really should simply stop emailing documents and use Google Docs to avoid all the Confusion that comes from creating many different versions of a document with updates from many different people and then being left with the task of integrating all those changes.
3. a fantastic photo sharing solution superior to facebook
4. Many more free products
3. Gmail is faster (it is both performs faster and is faster to use because of its layouts and keyboard shortcuts)
4. Gmail is more reliable
5. Gmail is more secure (SSL by default and it has two-factor authentication: see their support page and official blog post for more info in this two-factor authentication)
6. Gmail has more storage 
7. Gmail is more flexible
8. Gmail tracks conversations (like an internet forum)
9. Gmail does not append advertisements to your email
10. Gmail handles 25 MB attachments
11. Gmail has better anti-spam

The following are reasons that I encourage people to switch from other client services (such as Outlook) to Gmail:

1. Your Gmail account is also a Google account, so you get access to all the other great Google products (Google Docs, Google+, GChat, etc.)
2. Gmail auto-saves your email every few seconds
3. Gmail is faster
4. Gmail works on your Android seamlessly.  When you sign in with your Gmail account on your Android, all your mail, contacts and calendar items are synced to your phone.
5. Gmail is more reliable (a hard drive failure won't result in lost mail)
6. Gmail tracks conversations (See here.  I couldn't live with out this.)
7. Gmail looks the same on every computer (e.g., all of your old mail can be viewed on any computer)
8. Gmail has better anti-spam
9. Gmail essentially provides a backup of your mail (you won't loose it if your computer crashes).

In addition to the above advantages, Gmail will likely be more permanent than most other email services.  For those with email accounts provided by ISPs, you will likely loose your email address when you terminate your contract with your ISP (either because you switched ISPs or because you moved outside of the area covered by your old ISP).  Therefore, I recommend that you get a Gmail address now and have people slowly switch to using that address rather than waiting until you absolutely have to.

If that doesn't convince you, that's fine, I'm not interested in convincing you. (And that's fine really, not everyone has to be on Gmail, but everyone should be on Gmail.)

Signing up for Gmail

The first thing to do is to sign up for Gmail.  Easy enough.

Importing old email and contacts into Gmail

One of the first tasks to do when switching to Gmail is importing your old mail.  If you have a web client, you are probably in luck, just follow these instructions.  If you have downloaded email, you can upload it to your Gmail account through IMAP (cf. getting started with IMAP).  You can also import contacts from a CSV file (and you can export your contacts to a CSV file from many clients).

Pulling email into Gmail

Many people will still have your old email address, so now that you have a Gmail account, you will need to get the messages that people keep sending to your old address to go to your new address.  This way, you won't have to announce having a new email address; people will simply figure it out over time.

Receiving these messages can be done in two ways: Gmail can fetch your email from your account (on a roughly hourly basis), or you can forward your mail to your Gmail account from your old account (which happens nearly instantly).  If your old webmail client offers no way to forward your mail or access it through POP, you are out of luck.

Pulling email faster via POP

Gmail defaults to checking your old POP accounts once per hour.  This may be too slow for you.  In that case, you can run this pop mail checker.  It will ask Gmail for new mail every eight minutes (or faster if you pay him something).  Note that as of 2011-07-13, the Chrome version does not work (it only looks like it works).  I recommend running a Firefox window with Gmail open that you never close in your tray (use this to minimize anything to your tray).  I also recommend not run multiple instances of this script (e.g., installing the plugin on many computers and running them all simultaneously) as it could cause Gmail to start locking up and refusing to refresh.

Pushing email out from Gmail through other accounts

In addition to receiving email from your old email address, you can also send email using that address through Gmail.  Simply verify your email address to Gmail, and Gmail will pretend to be that address.

Using Gmail as your default mail handler

Clicking mailto: links (like this one test@test.com) opens your system's default mail client.  To use this Operating System feature with Gmail, you will need to install the Gmail notifier.  However, as of 2011-08-08, the notifier is broken if you have the "always use HTTPS" option (which you really should use if you want to avoid having your identity impersonated) and requires this hotfix, otherwise, you will get this error: "An error has occurred. Cannot connect to your mailbox. Service temporarily unavailable."

Now you can help others!

Watch the video below, use emailintervention.com , and send them to this document to do your part to make the world a better place.

Further Reading

• Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts

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