Import mails from gmail to yahoo mail

I was under the impression that Gmail is pretty safe and secure but just few days back one of my friends lost whole of his account. He just lost it; no wrong password nothing. Now mails sent to that id bounce back, and google support seems to be clueless. So I thought why not make a backup of all my mails to yahoo. Gmail provides free POP and forwarding support (it’s a shame yahoo doesn’t do that for free).  However, you can do the following, if someone knows a better way to accomplish the same, I will be obliged.

Scenario:
Original Gmail account:  original@gmail.com
Yahoo account:             backup@yahoo.com

Problem:  Copy all mails from original@gmail.com to backup@yahoo.com

               Solution:

1. Login to original@gmail.com. Go to Settings -> Forwarding & POP/IMAP and select
“Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded)”. In the setting
” When messages are accessed with POP ” select ” Keep gmails copy in the inbox”.
Make sure you close all your MUAs e.g. kmail, Thunderbird etc. because they will download all the mails again. Enable them later after the mail backup to yahoo.

2. Create a new Gmail account, e.g.  temp@gmail.com

3. Login to temp@gmail.com. Go to Settings -> Forwarding & POP/IMAP. Select “Forward a copy of incoming mail to” and fill in backup@yahoo.com.

4. Go to Settings -> Accounts & Imports  and click on “Add POP3 email account”.

i) Fill in original@gmail.com as email address

ii) Enter your username and password.

iii) Select pop.gmail.com as POP server. Port should be 995 (i guess its default)

iv) Check “Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail”. Uncheck all the others.

v) Click on “Add Account”.

And you are done. It will take some time(may be a couple of days depending upon number/size of your mails) to Gmail to copy all your mails from original account to temp account and forward them to your yahoo account. You can make a filter in yahoo mail so that all your backed up mails don’t clutter the inbox. After you find that all your mails have been copied to yahoo account, you can disable the POP in Gmail or you can choose “Enable POP for mail that arrives from now on” so that your MUA again starts downloading the new mails. Also, it might be a good idea to delete the temp gmail account otherwise it will keep sending mails to your yahoo account (or you can just disable mail import & forwarding).