As announced on the Gmail Blog, the folks at Google have added an important update to Gmail: mail and contact import features for everyone. Somewhat annoyingly, these features were previously available for newly created Gmail accounts, but were not available for the many of us who have had Gmail accounts for some time. Many of us also have old email accounts that were around before Gmail arrived. The importing procedure is easy, although some waiting is required.

To import email from another account into your Gmail account, just go to the “Settings” link that is on the upper right of your Gmail account, and click it.  Once you’ve done that, hit the “Accounts and Import” tab, as seen in the screenshot above. You can import from Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, or other webmail or POP3 accounts via a wizard. There’s a “Learn More” link if you get confused. Note that you will need to supply the password for your other account.

I went through the import process for an older Hotmail account I have. I haven’t gotten all the messages imported yet, but Google confirms that this is to be expected: “Copying mail over usually takes a couple days, occasionally up to a week — but eventually it all arrives,” says the post announcing the new features. You can also request to have email sent to the other account forwarded to your Gmail account for 30 days.

This was a long time coming from Google, but it will be convenient to not have to hop between email accounts all the time — especially since one of Gmail’s strengths is its huge storage capacity; that should allow me to cut a couple of accounts that I have altogether.

Hit any snags importing an old account into Gmail? Let us know in the comments.

Y’know, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with an AOL Mail email address…plenty of AIM users, but no one with AOL Mail – at least no one who will admit it…

Regardless, there must be a good number of such users, to encourage AOL to develop a plugin that enables their users to collect mail from Yahoo!’s email service, a plugin which launched late last week.

Inline with AOL’s recent strategy at the AOL.com home page to embrace and integrate third party content and services within their own properties, Yahoo’s messaging behemoth is now available – albeit as message previews only – within the AOL Mail interface. Users can then click through to their corresponding message at the Yahoo! service.

It’s all kinda, um, underwhelming and the kind of feature that should have been there all along; an indictment of the ‘data prison’ strategies employed by web’s largest properties.

Data portability is a subject I’ve written about many times here at Web Worker Daily, notably with regard to the portability of email data trapped within services such as Hotmail, Google Apps and Outlook…though fortunately (as these links illustrate) each of those services has a third-party ‘jailbreaking option’ to liberate your data.

With much of our personal and professional data now residing ‘in the cloud’ and on remote services, it’s ever more important to press for the ability to export and import data from any service – and insist on the use of standards where possible. I’m sure that the product manager for AOL Mail has come across the IMAP and POP email protocols. Perhaps offering such capabilities by default can weaken the retention of a customer, but its possible to mitigate this by offering data portability or export as a premium option and actually competing on design and features, rather than crippling a service.

Services such as Dopplr and del.icio.us have long had export features baked in – making this central to a service’s design philosophy illustrates a respect and value for the user that is likely to ensure a degree of loyalty.

With Microsoft’s announcement this week that Outlook and Outlook Express will no longer support desktop access to Hotmail accounts raises some interesting questions on data portability.

After 30th June, Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail application will be the only means by which desktop and offline access to Hotmail accounts will be supported. This effectively means that a Hotmail user’s messages continue to be imprisoned within a closed ecosphere of services and applications. OK, smart people won’t be using Outlook, Outlook Express or Hotmail, but millions do and many have years of messages archived that they may wish to continue accessing outside a web-based interface.

However, there are some unofficial mechanisms that can not only continue to provide offline and desktop access, but also standards-based access into most email clients

• IzyMail has close to a decade of experience in delivering webmail gateway services. A one-off payment of $17.95 buys a one-year subscription that equips any Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and Gmail account with a POP and IMAP ‘wrapper’, so users can send, receive and synchronise messages using most desktop clients, such as Thunderbird, Apple Mail and Outlook

• Thunderbird’s WebMail extension plays a similar role to IzyMail, though is of course limited only to Thunderbird and doesn’t necessarily support the various permutations of a service like Hotmail (Live Hotmail, Hotmail Classic etc.) but does support a wider range of services

• Apple Mail fans can use a similar plugin – HTTP Mail – to retrieve Hotmail messages and folder.

Of these solutions, I’d recommend IzyMail’s standards-based approach, freeing the user to employ any both leading mail protocols with the widest range of clients. Indeed, IzyMail saw a huge spike in subscriptions with the launch of the iPhone last Summer as users utilised POP and IMAP webmail gateways to synchronise their email with their phones.