If you spend a lot of time on the web, either for leisure or work, you may find yourself having a lot of email accounts. I know I do. I have heaps that I regularly check; work, websites, personal. But I found myself wasting so much time logging in and logging out of Hotmail and Gmail individually just to check my emails. I decided I had to do something.

What I first did, was to download Mozilla Thunderbird. I set up of all my Hotmail and Gmail accounts and it worked very well. But if I was away from my desktop computer for a while, I found I was going back to my old ways. Thankfully, Gmail had a solution.

To simplify the whole process, the answer was to make one of my Gmail accounts my main email account. Then, forward all my emails, including those in my Hotmail email account, to that Gmail account. This way I would be able to access hotmail email from Gmail. However, this is not a simple as opening Hotmail, go to options and click forward. The problem is, Hotmail only allows you to forward emails to the following domains: hotmail.com, msn.com, live.com, or a Windows Live Custom Domain.

how to access hotmail from gmail

Below, I am going to show you how to download Hotmail emails to Gmail.

What you have to do then is go to Gmail "“> Settings"“> Accounts and there will be an option that allows you to download mail from other accounts.

Type your email address, and then click next. You will then be prompted to enter your username, password, select your POP server and choose some other options for your mail settings in Gmail.

Use these settings to add a Hotmail email account:

  • POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)
  • User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
  • Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live

Once you are done, click on Add Account. If you want to send email from the account you just added, make sure you click "˜Yes. I want to be able to send mail as"¦". This allows you select an email address from a drop-down box.

So now, all email received from your other email accounts will be downloaded to your Gmail Account. This allows you to access all your emails in one easy location.

If you only have one Gmail Account and a lot of Hotmail accounts, I'd suggest to forward all your Hotmail account mail to one Hotmail Account as this forward is done almost instantly. The other advantage is if you have a lot of mail, downloading your mail to Gmail will be much quicker as it only has to connect to one account.

So now we have solved the problem of accessing all your mail in one location. But how do we now access these emails offline? If all our emails are being forwarded to one account, how do we split them up? I'll cover this in my next post. Watch out for it.

Want to learn to be a Gmail ninja and have all the skills necessary to manage your emails? Check out other MakeUseOf posts on Gmail.

What do you use to aggregate your emails to one location? Any alternative ways to access Hotmail emails from Gmail. Do you use a web app that you can trust to access your email accounts or do you prefer a "hack" like this? Let us know in the comments!