Once it's set up, you can select this address in the 'From' field when replying or forwarding. If you would still like to have the option of sending mail from Gmail that appears to recipients as if it were sent from your old email address, you can set up a custom 'From:' by going to Settings > Accounts > Send mail as: > Add another email address.Ĭlick on 'Next Step' and then 'Send Verification.' You'll receive an email with instructions on how to validate your old address. Then, validate with 'Add Account' and finally, select 'Yes, I want to be able to send mail as I'm a big fan of using the 'from:me' search in Gmail that lets me look for email I sent using any name or address by simply searching 'from:me.' I wanted to make sure I could continue to find everything I’ve sent under all my old addresses and aliases, and this last step makes that work.

I found it useful to label incoming messages with 'Imported' (use any thoughtful label you can think of), so I could easily identify imported mail later on. A new window will pop-up asking you for the email address you're going to import mail from. Go to Settings > Accounts > Get mail from other accounts > Add another mail account. In the end, the move went smoothly, but I picked up a couple of tips along the way that I thought were worth sharing.įirst, you need to tell Gmail how to retrieve your mail from old accounts using POP. Because I keep messages for a long time and like to frequently search them, I wanted to move my old email to Gmail so it would all be in one place and I could access it on any device, including my mobile phone. When I switched to Gmail more than a year ago, I still had a significant amount of old email stored with my old address.

Posted by Olivier Beyssac, Site Reliability Engineer

Gmail taking a long time to send email