In my last post I mentioned that I am going abandon Google for different services starting with my mail account.

I am writing this to tell that the first step toward my Migrations phase of is DONE. I have successfully migrated my mails and a new mail ID to the beautiful and awesome Outlook.

I had few initial hiccups for the migration one being that all my contacts are in Gmail since I was using an Android phone before (now a Windows phone), and the second being the Gmail’s fantastic ‘+’ feature for emails. I have my emails separated with the ‘+’ symbol for different purposes like, vinoth+friends@gmail.com, vinoth+github@gmail.com and so on.. This provided an easeful management of my mails. But there comes an lesser but useful alternative in the name of alias in Outlook. It enables to create different email accounts but with same password and mailbox. Although it provided lesser flexibility in managing 10s of aliases but it’s better than completely lacking.

So I had to consolidate all my multi purpose email addressess into three aliases. One being for my personal user, Two being my email address to the external world and my work related, and the third one for all the newsletters and promotional emails.

I went on and created my new Email address with Outlook and the different aliases. Microsoft does a good job in getting users to its email service from its competitors by providing various help and tools for the migration. One being the email migration tool which I feel is pretty much covers everything from migration standpoint.

All I had to do is, go to their Email migration portal and select the provider and it takes care of the entire migration process. Before that I had to disable all the labels so that the POP fetch could be handled properly.

Only problem in this migration is that rather than making a copy of the contacts it links up the contacts to Gmail which is not good since it won’t let you delete / modify the contacts from outlook. So, I had to disconnect the Gmail once all the emails are downloaded went to Gmail’s settings and downloaded all the contacts in .csv format and in Outlook imported them all letting me to manage my contacts natively.

After that I connected the Gmail account so that I could send from my Gmail account for the time being, only to see all the mails being received twice in my Outlook account. After some initial digging, it is found that the problem was due to POP fetch from Outlook and Email forwarding from Gmail both being enabled. I disabled the forwarding and it works fine now.

It’s been three days since I migrated the email account and I am slowly letting my contacts know about the new email account and in the meantime consolidating the emails by unsubscribing to almost all of the newsletters that are no more useful for me in my new job.

Things I love in Outlook

In the three days I discovered more features in Outlook which I rather miss in Gmail.

Its the awesome single window feature, from which I could manage my Twitter account / Facebook account (I don’t have one) / Chat with Gmail friends all from the mail console itself. It wasa blissful feature that Gmail should have in its hood.

The Slick user interface from which I can read my emails more clearly, which I really had trouble with the Gmail’s interface.

The mail composing tools. The mail composing tools of Gmail is really annoying for me, since I have to click through various of links just to add the CC in my email and the pasting the content from other emails results in horrible formatting. Outlook provides a full page email composing page which is fantastic to use.

Things I miss in Outlook

As of now, there is nothing. I am enjoying the new Outlook and it’s providing more features than in Gmail. I haven’t used Gmail’s calendar or its Tasks feature so I won’t have a problem with it lacking here.

I am still in the migration phase and will be moved away from most of the services by the end of this week. Will keep you posted.