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.

Although I prefer and primarily use Gmail for the majority of my email needs, I do connect it via IMAP to Microsoft Outlook as well. And while there are many options available to extend the functionality of Microsoft Outlook including taglocity and Clear Context, Xobni is the one that I seem to come back to.

I’ve detailed my week with Xobni experience in the past and continue to find Xobni a nice addition to my Outlook experience. Recently they added LinkedIn integration and today they are announcing a whole slew of additional connections.

In this latest release, Xobni brings integration with Yahoo! Mail, Facebook, Hoovers and greatly enhanced Skype functionality.

Each of these services is opt-in and are neatly integrated into the Xobni Sidebar upon activation.

The capabilities introduced vary but highlights include:

Yahoo!Mail : Message previews are availabe from within Outlook and are fully searchable using Xobni. Contacts and attachments from your Yahoo! Mail accounts appear in the Xobni sidebar.

Facebook: View status messages, profile pictures and other recent updates your contacts have made via Facebook

Skype: Big improvements here as you can now view status, send messages and initiate Skype to Skype calls all from the Xobni sidebar.

Hoovers: Pulls company information like description and size based upon the email domain of your contacts.

I am seeing a big increase in the number of aggregators and universal inbox applications like Gist, which seeks out more information about your contacts, or Fuser which brings all of your communications together in one place.

As we connect with people through so many various channels, having a way to tie these communications together and connected to your contacts is becoming more critical. If you’re an Outlook user, these Xobni improvements look to be a step in the right direction.

Xobni is a free download and is available for computers running Windows and Microsoft Outlook 2003 / 2007

Can tools like Xobni turn Outlook into the ultimate communication interface?

A little over a year ago, I made a big mistake. I moved from Gmail to Yahoo Mail.

As a web worker, a large part of my day is spent in my inbox, so it wasn’t a decision I made willy-nilly. When the new version of Yahoo Mail was launched, I gave it a try and was won over by its resemblance to a desktop email client. Drag and drop actions, support for right-click context menus and a well-designed and attractive interface are all features that had me thinking the grass was greener on the Yahoo side.

I was also attracted by the promise of unlimited email storage and support for up to 20MB of attachments with the Yahoo Mail Plus subscription. And little things, like the prompt that appears after you email someone that isn’t in your addressbook that asks if you want to add them, and the ability to organize email into folders. So I made the jump to Yahoo Mail, and I’ve been ruing it ever since.

The biggest issue I have with Yahoo Mail is the poorly-implemented search feature. I’m one of those people that uses their inbox as the main repository of work-related information. Things like article commissions, meeting details and a never-ending stream of press releases are all stored in my email, and rather than tag them or put them into folders (the latter of which I do maybe once a month just to move everything out of my inbox), I rely heavily on the search function to find information that I’m looking for.

The search function in Gmail is excellent. The one in Yahoo Mail – terrible. I’d enter search terms for messages that I knew were in my inbox ’somewhere’, and Yahoo Mail would find what I was looking for maybe 50% of the time. Even doing a search on a sender’s name wouldn’t produce a complete list of all the email from that person.

Originally I thought it was an indexing issue for new email, and that it would eventually catch up after a day or so. But no – even email that had been in my inbox for months weren’t being found by the search feature, which means that I’ve had to manually hunt down a lot of my email by date. When you get as much email as I do (around 200 a day), that’s a lot of wasted time!

Close behind the search issue on the irritation scale is the incredibly un-intelligent spam blocker. It’s gotten to the point that I have to check the spam folder every time I check my inbox. Perfectly legitimate email with none of the tell-tale spam keywords have landed in that folder, as have email that I’ve actually replied to previously. I’m subscribed to a few mailing lists, and around half of those messages end up in the spam folder, with seemingly no predictable pattern as to which messages are junked or not. To top it off, I’m still getting actual spam in my main inbox.

I miss Gmail. I’ve still got my old Google Apps account under a secondary email address, but now I’m looking at my options for migrating all of my Yahoo Mail to Gmail, plus transfer the domain name, which I bought through Yahoo. The enormity of the task makes me want to hang onto Yahoo Mail for a bit longer. Anyone know if there’s a quick way to do this? All of a sudden getting a virtual assistant to do it all for me looks very appealing.

How much do you rely upon services that are out of your control?  If you’re like most web workers it’s probably quite a bit.  We covered this topic in January, but the recent failures of Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft Live Hotmail have resurfaced the call to have backup solutions in place if your online email provider is unavailable for any reason.

For those of us who depend on web based mail such as Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, or Hotmail; a backup plan is necessary to keep your business running should these services go down.   Google makes this process very easy with it’s support of POP and IMAP.  If you use IMAP, you constantly have a a backup copy of your emails located on your local drive.  For those who are looking for a different solution, check out Lifehacker’s solution, or GmailSync from Nauman Leghari.

To backup your Hotmail email, the method for backing up involves using Outlook Express to get your message and then using Outlook Express to backup the messages for your archival purposes.  If anyone has any other methods for backing up Hotmail, please leave a comment and I’ll update the post. 

For users of Yahoo Mail, it appears the only way to gain downloadable access to your emails is to pay $19.99 for access to Yahoo! Plus.  Yahoo Plus will allow you to forward your mail and give you access to your mail via POP, among other features.  Once you sign up for Mail Plus, simply use your mail client’s backup facility to create a backup copy of your emails.

It would be advisable to take these service downtimes as a call to look at your email system and see how you can create some redundancy in the event your service provider is unavailable.  Another upshot of creating backups is if you decide to move do a different mail provider, you will already have your ducks in a row to easily restore your mail to the new provider.