Here's How to Consolidate Email Accounts

Move All Email and Contacts Into One Account

I understand your dilemma. For various reasons, people often end up with multiple email accounts on several hosts. You may have email accounts with Outlook (formerly called Hotmail), Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, iCloud, and with one or more Internet Service Providers. It gets confusing and hard to keep track of. It also takes a lot of time to check for new mail on all the services.

The good news is Yes, it is possible to consolidate all those email accounts into one, without losing anything stored on the other services.

You'll probably want to keep all your email accounts active and receiving mail, at least for a while. Those addresses are out there and if people don't know your new address, they have no other way to reach you. But you want mail sent to those other inboxes to be forwarded to your "One Address". That way, you only need to log onto one place, saving lots of time. Simple is better.

I chose Google's Gmail for my One Address. It's reliable. The Gmail name is widely used by both personal and business users. Gmail is searchable in many useful ways, and its spam filter is highly effective. Best of all, Gmail lets you consolidate all your other email accounts very easily.

You could just logon to all your email accounts, and send a change of address message to everyone in your address books. And you should do that, but it won't really help you consolidate everything without a lot of extra effort.

Of course you want to import to your One Address all your email contacts from the other services, AND your old email saved on those services. Some email providers let you set a forwarding address, usually with the option to keep or discard any new messages after forwarding. Not all provide an easy way to export your contacts. But Gmail lets you do all that with a few simple steps.

Using Gmail's Import Feature

After logging into Gmail, in the upper right corner, click on the gear icon, then See all settings. Next, click the Accounts and Import tab. Then click on Import Mail and Contacts and just follow directions. One by one, you will enter the email address and password for each of your other accounts. (This method only works for web-based email accounts or local email accounts that have POP3 access. POP3 is very common, but check with your service provider if you're not sure.)

You'll be given the option to import contacts and old mail and to import new mail arriving at the old address for 30 days. Click "Start Import" and go do the same for your other email accounts. To check the status of your import, look under Settings > Accounts and Import. Your imported messages will show up with a Gmail label that matches the email address you're importing. (Note: You can only move messages, not folders or labels from your other account.)

Google advises that the import process may take several hours, even up to two days, before you start seeing imported mail. In actual practice, I started receiving mail imported from my Yahoo account within minutes. Your experience may vary. But importing goes on without you, you don't even have to be logged on to Gmail.

Before importing from other accounts, it's a good idea to review and delete old mail you really don't need, and keep the keepers. Focus on the oldest and largest messages as candidates for dumping. Usually the space hogs will be emails with large attachments such as videos, photos, PDFs, etc. With a Gmail account, you can find large attachments by typing (for example) size:10M in the search bar. That will show you all emails exceeding 10 megabytes. You can experiment with larger or smaller size thresholds. Yahoo Mail doesn't have a similar function, but you can sort emails by size in Outlook.

Once the consolidation process is complete, and the 30-day forwarding has expired, you have only one webmail site to manage, and just one username and password to remember. Email checking will go much faster with only one account to check. And you'll have all your contacts and messages in one place as well.

Have you done an email consolidation? Tell me how you did it, and how it went. Post your comments or questions below.