I have a personal Yahoo email address. Everyday I receive a lot of spam and this wastes a lot of my time. I am thinking of moving from Yahoo mail to Gmail.
But how should I do it properly?
How do I redirect all emails to Yahoo mail to my new email account, say Gmail, while preventing people from spamming my Gmail account?
If you pay for the POP3 service from Yahoo, you can use the option in Gmail to import all your mail from your Yahoo account, either copying or moving the emails. Gmail will use POP3 to access the server and download all existing emails in the background (You don't have to have Gmail open in your browser).
I'm not terriblely familiar with Yahoo. You can check to see if there's an option to "redirect" all emails to another address. That will redirect (not forward with FW: ) all new emails to the new address.
Here's the Gmail documentation on importing email from another account.
Building on Chris Thompson’s answer…
Once you migrate to Gmail, you can setup a forwarder in Yahoo mail to handle any future email. (See this resource for details.)
I'd also setup an auto-reply in Yahoo letting people know you changed email addresses. (See this help page for details.)
Then you can eventually remove the forwarder and close out your old Yahoo account (or keep it open and occasionally check it manually). That way, you receive less "junk" to filter through.
