Transfering emails from BT to Gmail?

DampDog

DampDog

DampDog

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Not sure if this is the place to ask, but I've drawn a blank using my GoogleFu.

Long story short. I've been with BT for years but decided to bin them off. Now my BT email address has been my main email address for 20 years or more, so has accrued a shed load of emails.

I also have a gmail account that I use occasionally. I want to make the gmail account my primary account and move all my old emails into there. Basically so I'm not faced with this problem again, should I switch ISP again.

It's my own fault, I never gave it a thought as I'd been with BT for literally decades.

I thought it would be a simple task of simply importing the email/contacts from BT to Gmail but for whatever reason when I try to use Gmail's import tool it points me at Yahoo. (possibly because BT used Yahoo front end years back) So it doesn't recognise my email address so I'm stumped.

It's one of those, that will be easy jobs...:rolleyes::rolleyes:

BT want £7.50 month to keep the email alive. They can stick that where the sun don't shine.
 
Quickest way would be setup your BT emails on Outlook or a mail client that lets you export to .pst let it sync a copy. Create a new profile adding your gmail then import the .pst file.
 
OK sounds like a plan. I use a little program called EmClient anyway.
So I should already have local copies of all the emails on the servers ( I assume that's how it works)

Thing is, in about a week or so my email@BT account/server will vanish into the ether, so the only copies I will retain will be my local copies. Ideally I would like to be able copy my local files over to my new email@PlusNet account so I still have copies on the server and locally to try and be disaster proof.

My understanding of how a .pst file works is minimal at best. I thought when you when created the .pst, it includes all your accounts into a single file? So you get copies of all your accounts locally. However when my BT server vanishes the local copies no longer mirror to anything.

Hope I've explained that so as it makes sense. In essence I want all my emails at emails@BT to live in the emails@PlusNet account, so they are all mirrored again.
 
All you have to do as already stated is just get an email client that supports exporting to PST file. A PST is just a file that contains all of your email combined into one file.

Once you have gone from BT > Export > PST just log into your new email providor, send a test email to make sure it's working then IMPORT > PST. It's as simple as that really.
 
mrbell1984 said:
All you have to do as already stated is just get an email client that supports exporting to PST file. A PST is just a file that contains all of your email combined into one file.

Once you have gone from BT > Export > PST just log into your new email providor, send a test email to make sure it's working then IMPORT > PST. It's as simple as that really.
Click to expand...

Already at it thanks. Just had no need to do it before so finding my way a little.
Cheers.
 
DampDog said:
BT want £7.50 month to keep the email alive. They can stick that where the sun don't shine.
Click to expand...
fwiw i changed from BT about a year ago and was faced with a similar situation. proceeded to go through any accounts i could think of that would need me to change the email address.....spent an absolute age doing this and probably still missed something somewhere. anyway the cut off date for my @btinernet.com email to become inactive came and went.....that was as i say about a year ago and it's still active. happened to email BT a couple of months ago just to let them know, they replied telling me that the email address was already deactivated.....i wasn't going to argue with them (i'd emailed their support from the apparently deactivated account :confused:)
 
Aye it's deffo a pain in the backside. Been with them for so long I just became complacent and never gave it much thought. I'll just have to work through everything, but no doubt something will come to light that I've missed. I would have chosen Gmail as my primary in the first instance, but the webmail interface was awful back then. I don't have a windows mail account and was thinking about starting afresh, but I'd put money on it being charged for at some point in the future. I'm just a tight-wad.. :):)
 
DampDog said:
No idea why their own import points at Yahoo. Yet another BT annoyance.
Click to expand...
but the bt email is managed by yahoo, and is yahoo under the hood .. eg when yahoo were compromised many BT email accounts were too,
so it doesn't surprise me the comments that account persisted after stopping BT subscription.
- the BT email password reset does seem convoluted though and I had to call BT on behalf of my folks when they last asked him to change pswd,
I had not tried to see if the email account config can be accessed directly via yahoo ?

I had configured their bt email, anyway, to forward it to a gmail account, you can leave it in that state after leaving BT (so still redirecting when the account does not really die) like I have always done myself with plusnet/virgin/sky email accounts.
(I am not sure those companies have better/different privacy to google/gmails ... they all read your email )
 
I had BT call me last evening with a "sorry to hear you're leaving us follow-up" Apparently the last call handler I spoke to wasn't happy with the way I had been dealt with and raised a complaint on my behalf. They credited my account with a little good-will gesture and refunded the fees they're applied in error. I asked if my email would end on the last day of switching and was told they normally give you 90 days grace, sometimes a little longer depending how it falls.

I knew their emails were initially "Yahoo" However for the most part I thought they had been switched to BT. I suspect the issues for importing emails to Gmail are probably down to Google pointing to the wrong place.

Anyway, spent the majority of yesterday afternoon importing all my old stuff into my Gmail account (which I barely used prior) and setting up a new rescue account using a free outlook.com address. Hopefully should I need to move ISP again email issues shouldn't be an issue. In truth it's something I should have given some thought years back to avoid having to scramble to get stuff sorted. I'm just not savvy or organized enough.

Thanks for the pointers folks. I know you can find all this stuff on TinTerNet if you spend some time digging. But the folks on here are normally up to speed on most things, so answers come faster...;):)

Thanks again.

I assume the PlusNet Hub is just a clone of the BT HH5? I'm sure for my needs it's more than up to the job, but are there any more robust/flexible alternative worth considering.
 
Well it really does take an age. I spent a whole afternoon and a few evenings working through everything I have written down and a few odd bits that came to mind here and there. I've continued to monitor the old accounts for nigh on two weeks and they have now gone "quiet" so the hope is I have caught everything that was important. I spoke to BT customer service and the default time-span for the web-mail remaining active is 90 days. However it can be longer.

I assume that if I want to empty the old account content it's a matter of deleting everything via the web-mail interface or email client end? (unless there is a reset content option buried in the web-mail options?) Am I right in thinking that simply deleting the "account" in the email client I am using, will simply severe the connection and remove (or hide them) locally on my PC. However everything will still remain in-place on the mail/web-server side until "deleted?"

Have I understood it correctly, in that while removing the email account. Mail content will get deleted from my email client (eM Client in my case) However contacts will remain intact and not vanish with any associated email deletions? I don't use Microsoft's "People-app" It doesn't appear to save all the content from my email client contacts manager.
 
This thread illustrates why it's good to have your own domain name. Just have the domain set to forward everything to BT / GMail / whoever. Then you sign up to everything with an ID from your domain. And when you change ISP or mail provider you just update the mail forwarder and the emails come to you at your new address.
 
Quartz said:
This thread illustrates why it's good to have your own domain name. Just have the domain set to forward everything to BT / GMail / whoever. Then you sign up to everything with an ID from your domain. And when you change ISP or mail provider you just update the mail forwarder and the emails come to you at your new address.
Click to expand...

Well yes... But it's easy enough to be wise after the event. I would imagine the average "home-user" will never give it a second thought until the day comes when they need to switch ISP. Like many things if you know how to do it, it's easy, if not it's a learning curve and a task. Personally I have been with BT for literally decades so it never crossed my mind. How much does it cost to get your own domain name and get everything forwarded??
 
DampDog said:
How much does it cost to get your own domain name and get everything forwarded??
Click to expand...

I've used Fasthosts for perhaps 2 decades and it's a tenner a year. You want a domain provider which does catch-all forwarding which effectively gives you an infinite number of email addresses.
 
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