How to transfer emails from Yahoo! to Gmail

A lot of people, like me, who switched their email accounts to Gmail have ended up not being able to transfer their yahoo emails to Gmail since being able to do that you need to have an Upgraded version of Yahoo! Mail.
Well, at least not anymore now. There is a way to help you move all your past and the incoming messages from Yahoo! to Gmail. Here is how:

A word of caution:
You may want to delete some of the unwanted messages from your Yahoo! account or create folder and put some un-necessary messages from being forwarded to your Gmail account, in order to avoid overflooding. This method that you are about to lear, will move all the Yahoo! inbox messages, so if you have say, 6,000 email messages, you may want to re-consider and do something before transfering. Alternatively, if you have started transfering emails, you can go to your Gmail's Settings section and stop the forwarding process. Trust me, I learned it the hard way, I wouldn't like to see you overwhelmed by this!

• Open a new Gmail account (even if you have one working now, you may need to open a new one in order to have the transfer feature available, at least I had to to that).
• Once you sign in into your new Gmail account, go to your the Settings page and find the Accounts and Import option.
• Click on the button next to Import mail and contacts: option

• A pop up window will be opened asking: What account do you want to import from? Fill in the Yahoo! email address you wan to move email messages from
• After writing the email address, click on the 'continue' button
• In this next page you will be required to write this Yahoo! email's password in order to authenticate that you are the owner of such an email account. It reads: Enter the password for _______@yahoo.com

Your password will be stored securely and deleted after we've finished importing your mail.

• Next is to decide what you want to be done with the imports.

• When everything is done and clear, you will start to receive your emails.
• You will see this message: Initial import done. New mail will be forwarded as they arrive.
• You may cancel receiving forwarded messages by using the stop button available next to the sentence above.

For the next 30 days, messages sent to your Yahoo! account will be forwarded to your assigned Gmail account. If after every 30 days you still want to your emails sent to Gmail, you will just need to go and re-activate the process.

Q: How do I connect your Newly created Gmail (that receives forwarded Yahoo! emails) to your regular/common Gmail account so that all those emails comes to your regular account?
A: That's easy, just as you are in your Settings page, go to the tab that reads, Forwarding and POP/IMAP
click on it and click on the Forward a copy of incoming mail to (write your regular/common email address to which you want the Yahoo! emails forwarded) then next to it, click on the drop down arrow to choose what you want be done with the forwarded messages whether to keep Gmail's copy in the Inboxarchive Gmail's copydelete Gmail's copy

or archive Gmail's copy or delete Gmail's copy.

Tip: You can also forward only some of your mail by creating a filter!

Note: It takes a few hours to see the imported email messages.

Happy forwarding!

Illustration images courtesy of amitbhawani's blog and cgullworld's blog