Forwarding Hotmail to Gmail
IzyMail gives you two
options to forward or import Hotmail to Gmail. Both options work perfectly
Ok but have a few specific advantages and disadvantages. This page helps you to
understand those differences and make an educated decision.
Forwarding frequency
The Gmail Mail Fetcher engine works at a frequency of about once per hour. There
is no option to change the collection interval.
The IzyMail Forwarder can be configured to check your Hotmail Inbox at different
intervals, up to once per 10 min, a lot faster than the Gmail import engine.
Message retention
The Gmail Mail Fetcher can be set to instantly delete the original message or to
keep it forever in the original mailbox.
When the 'Leave a copy ...' option is set, the Gmail engine occasionally gets confused
and re-downloads duplicates (tri-plicates, quadru-plicates, ...).
You can configure the IzyMail Forwarder to keep the original message for a day,
a week or a month, giving extra protection against message loss during transfer.
Capacity
The Google people have programmed the Gmail engine such that it downloads about
200 messages per cycle. The number may be lower when you have a lot of large messages
with (photo, video) attachments in your Hotmail Inbox.
To avoid system overload, similar, but slightly higher limits exist in the IzyMail
Forwarder.
Consequently, and with both systems, the transfer of an entire mailbox with several
thousand messages will not be instantaneous. It will take a considerable amount
of time (hours, possibly a day) until all your messages are forwarded to your Gmail
account.
XXL mailboxes
If your mailbox contains several thousand, possibly very large messages, the Gmail
import engine may have difficulties to retrieve all of them. To facilitate the process
for the Google machine, we recommend to UNcheck the 'Leave a copy ...' option in
the Gmail import profile.
The IzyMail forwarder is fully integrated with IzyMail and will happily handle any
amount of messages. The current record are 22,000+ messages from a single Hotmail
Inbox ...
Unreadable Hotmail messages
For some reason or another, your Hotmail mailbox may contain unreadable, corrupted
messages. They may show up in the listing, but when you click on them, there is
either an error message or simply a blank screen. IzyMail can do a lot, but we are
very sorry that it cannot reconstruct broken messages out of blue sky ...
When the Gmail import engine runs across such a broken message, it gets totally
confused and stops all further transfers. It will only resume when you find and
remove the corrupted message from your Hotmail box.
The IzyMail forward system is more tolerant against those errors. It will try a
number of times and finally jump over the unreadable message to continue the forwarding
process.
Pull vs. Push
The Gmail Mail Fetcher retrieves (pulls) the messages out of your Hotmail mailbox
(through IzyMail) whereas the IzyMail forwarder sends (pushes) your Hotmail to Gmail.
In times of aggressive spam filtering, sent messages are always in danger of being
falsely classified as spam.
It is believed that the Gmail collection engine bypasses the spam filters at Gmail
and delivers directly to your Inbox.