Outlook.com customers can now import their email from Yahoo Mail

After receiving a great response from the customers who imported their email from Gmail to Outlook.com, we’re excited to announce that, as of today, you can use Outlook.com to import and manage your email from Yahoo Mail and many other IMAP-enabled email providers.

A recent study* by Radius Global revealed that 81% of all email users are using multiple email services. Keeping up with numerous accounts can be time-consuming, but moving to a single email service is not as easy as it sounds. It’s often hard to give up your older email account, because that’s the one your friends and family know, and it’s the one you use to sign in to so many different services.

To help you, the import wizard in Outlook.com allows you to import and manage your mail from Yahoo Mail or many other IMAP-enabled email providers, or from Gmail. You can keep your old email addresses, but manage them all from one place: Outlook.com.

Importing your email from Yahoo Mail

Importing your Yahoo Mail into Outlook.com is simple. To get started, navigate to Options and then click Import email accounts. Select Yahoo, enter your Yahoo email address and password, and then click Import. This will also set up your Yahoo email address as a “send from” account, meaning you can continue to send emails from your Yahoo address, right from Outlook.com. It’s also possible to connect your Yahoo account to your Microsoft account, so your Yahoo contacts appear in Outlook.com.

Importing your email from other email providers

We’ve also added the ability to import from many other popular IMAP-enabled email providers. To get started, navigate to Options, click Import email accounts, then select Other email provider. Most popular IMAP-enabled email providers are supported.

In both cases, the import happens in the background, so you can continue using Outlook.com or even sign out while it’s happening. Once the import is complete, we’ll send you an email to let you know. Import time will vary depending on how many emails there are to import.

Importing your mail will not affect your old account–you can keep using it as you always have. However, we’re confident that once you try Outlook.com, you’ll love it.

If you haven’t already, we encourage you to try the tool and let us know what you think.

–Mike Schackwitz, Principal Director of Program Management, Outlook.com

*The online quantitative survey and analysis of 3,002 email users in the US, France, and Brazil was conducted by Radius Global Market Research (www.radius-global.com) from Dec 2013 to January 2014.