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.

Yesterday, Google launched offline support for Gmail, a feature that’s been long anticipated by the service’s users. The feature is being gradually rolled out to UK and U.S. users and will be available via the Labs area of Gmail’s Settings page.

Using Google’s Gears platform, the new capability enables users to maintain a local cache of messages which is kept synchronised with Gmail’s servers when and if connectivity becomes available. Features include the ability to read, star and label messages as well as queue messages to be sent from the user’s outbox. Google’s claiming they’re able to provide a near-live representation of the service when in offline mode.You can read Kevin Tofel’s initial impressions of Gmail’s offline support over at jkOntheRun.

Gmail has long offered offline support through standards-based POP and IMAP interfaces, enabling users to wire their Gmail to their email client of choice. Personally, I utilize Gmail’s web interface when connected and, when offline, access my mailboxes through a combination of Gmail’s IMAP support, coupled with Apple Mail. Though these features have worked well historically, even IMAP folders don’t map cleanly onto Gmail’s folder structure – and there can be minor glitches in synchronisation.

What Google is promising is the ability to work in the same environment and with the same features, both offline and online, a precedent that casts some doubt over the usefulness of rich Internet clients, such as those built on Adobe AIR.

Interestingly, buried in today’s news was the announcement that, Hotmail is finally adding POP3 support – eleven years after Microsoft acquired the service! We’ve previously covered how it’s possible to jailbreak Hotmail data and transfer messages out of the ageing app.

If anything illustrates why data portability is important in web-based services (and for web workers), it’s this reality; Microsoft passed an 11-year sentence of imprisonment on its users’ personal data and is now paying the price with a 5 percent decline in its user numbers.

Read more at the Official Gmail blog and Hotmail Now Does POP3.

Have you tried Gmail’s offline support?

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.

A few days ago Microsoft released a beta for Office Outlook Connector 12.1; essentially a plugin for Microsoft’s near-ubiquitous email client that helps address some of the issues we’ve discussed previously at Web Worker Daily including Jailbreaking Hotmail and Exchange-ing Microsoft for Google.

Microsoft Office Outlook Connector provides Outlook users with the capability of synchronizing messages, calendars and contacts with Hotmail and Office Live Mail accounts, effectively providing offline access for those web-based services – and perhaps more importantly, the ability to make that data portable and transferable to other services, such as Gmail.

Previously, the Outlook Connector was a premium service offered to MSN customers, but this incarnation is free to use, though of course, this may change once the beta period is complete. For MSN customers already paying for the older service, they’ll be automatically upgraded to the Live Mail and Live Calendar editions of Hotmail and MSN Calendar.

Though other web-bases services such as Yahoo and Gmail do offer offline access for messages via various IMAP and POP options, offline calendar and contact data remains haphazardly implemented (as illustrated by Google’s recent launch of OS X contact synchronization).

For once it seems Microsoft is ahead of the Web 2.0 crowd with a release that’s profoundly useful – though as rumors build for more and more Google Gears enabled offline applications, it’s a lead that won’t last much longer. On the other hand, Adobe AIR applications may be the carrier for this new wave of applications.

You can download the Outlook Connector 12.1 beta here…

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.