How do I transfer a Gmail account to a different Google account?

Question

I am moving to a new ISP and realised that I'm going to have a problem with my email as I use my ISP's provided address. So, being smart, decided to take this opportunity to move to Gmail. I then recalled that I registered an ideal Gmail email address back when it first launched. The account was never used for anything (including Gmail), so it has been dead with no activity. So, I want to use that email address. However, my Google account is all linked up with the ISP email address and uses a different Google account to the account with the nice Gmail email address.

How can I transfer the ownership of [email protected] over to my currently active Google account?

I have the following setup:

Account1 (created eight years ago and forgotten):

• Login: [email protected]
• Gmail: [email protected]
• Acount activity: none

Account2 (created four years ago and still used):

• Login: [email protected]
• Gmail: none
• Account activity: loads and current

What I want to achieve:

• Login: [email protected]
• Gmail: [email protected]
• Account activity: loads and current from account2

Answer 1

GMail Mail Fetcher

Connect your ISP's account to your Gmail account using POP3 so your Gmail account will serve as email client that will read emails from another POP3 (optionally also SMTP) account. You will use the same connection settings as your ISP is providing you with to connect an email client (i.e. Outlook) to fetch email.

I'm using a similar thing and also set a rule that the other emails are getting labelled correctly so I immediately know which emails are actually POP'ed and which ones are addressed to by Gmail account.

Read this guideline how to regularly get email from another account to your Gmail.

Answer 2

I don't believe that what you want is possible: there is no way to change the login value and email address of your current Account 2 to another gmail address.

So you have two options

1. Continue to use account 2, and use the Gmail Mail Fetcher approach (above) or similar to run your email through [email protected].

2. Switch to using account 1, and transfer both contents and ownership of the other services from Account 2 to Account 1.
   Whether this will be fully possible or not depends on what services you are currently using, and whether they currently have a transfer feature (for example, Picasa-web-albums didn't have one for ages, but does have one now).