Your geek friends have convinced you to make that switch from Windows Live Hotmail to Gmail but the problem is how to move old Hotmail email messages and folders to the new Gmail address ? Hotmail doesn’t support IMAP or POP3 and it will take years to manually forward individual emails from Hotmail to Gmail.

No worries, there’s a wonderful solution that costs $0 and comes from Microsoft itself - its the Office Outlook connector and works with Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007.

Here’s a step by step guide on moving emails from Hotmail to Gmail via Outlook:

1. Install the Outlook connector and then configure your MSN Hotmail / Windows Live Hotmail accounts with Outlook.

2. Once you have all your Hotmail email message available locally inside Outlook, configure Gmail IMAP access inside Outlook.

3. Now copy or just drag-n-drop the Hotmail folders (downloaded in Step 1) over your Gmail Inbox folder in Outlook. Its the same migration procedure as described in a previous tutorial - Backup Outlook Email to Gmail.

As your Outlook synchronizes with Gmail, all your Hotmail messages will become available inside Gmail as well. And if you have multiple Hotmail accounts, this trick will help you consolidate email messages from all those account at one place.

Related: Move Emails from Gmail or Hotmail to Yahoo!