Forwarding mail

February 10, 2008 9:53 AM

Can anyone walk me through the steps (in as easy terms as possible) to forward my Hotmail emails to gmail?
posted by omnigut to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

As usual, Lifehacker has your answer.

In short, it requires that you set up hotmail and gmail in outlook and then using IMAP to sych them all.

Good luck!
posted by willie11 at 9:59 AM on February 10, 2008

A more complicated, but more automated way is to set up freepops and Fetchmail on your computer. Freepops acts as a translator that lets a program POP emails from hotmail. Fetchmail POPs those emails down, then can auto forward them to an address of your choice. These can both be run in the background, and this method eliminates the need to open Outlook periodically.

Neither program is super user-friendly, but there's good documentation for both, if you're willing to read through their websites.
posted by chrisamiller at 10:21 AM on February 10, 2008

Actually, as far as I know, Hotmail has a built in forwarding feature in the settings. I have my Hotmail account set to forward to a Gmail account. Another Gmail account also forwards to aforementioned Gmail account, and I have Thunderbird set up to download messages from that one Gmail account, so that I get emails from 3 email addresses in one account with one program.
posted by DMan at 10:30 AM on February 10, 2008

DMan: How do you do that? I just tried it and I got this error message:

You're only able to forward mail to a custom domain or an e-mail address that ends in hotmail.com, msn.com, or live.com. Please try again.
posted by divabat at 5:31 PM on February 10, 2008

Dman - free accounts don't let you do forwarding. IIRC, a paid account will let you do that.
posted by chrisamiller at 5:36 PM on February 10, 2008