When I switched to Gmail more than a year ago, I still had a significant amount of old email stored with my old address. Because I keep messages for a long time and like to frequently search them, I wanted to move my old email to Gmail so it would all be in one place and I could access it on any device, including my mobile phone. In the end, the move went smoothly, but I picked up a couple of tips along the way that I thought were worth sharing.

Setup First, you need to tell Gmail how to retrieve your mail from old accounts using POP. Go to Settings > Accounts > Get mail from other accounts > Add another mail account. A new window will pop-up asking you for the email address you're going to import mail from. Fill this in and click on "Next Step."  I found it useful to label incoming messages with "Imported" (use any thoughtful label you can think of), so I could easily identify imported mail later on. Then, validate with "Add Account" and finally, select "Yes, I want to be able to send mail as yourname@gmail.com." I'm a big fan of using the "from:me" search in Gmail that lets me look for email I sent using any name or address by simply searching "from:me." I wanted to make sure I could continue to find everything I’ve sent under all my old addresses and aliases, and this last step makes that work. Sending mail from your old address If you would still like to have the option of sending mail from Gmail that appears to recipients as if it were sent from your old email address, you can set up a custom "From:" by going to Settings > Accounts > Send mail as: > Add another email address. Click on "Next Step" and then "Send Verification." You'll receive an email with instructions on how to validate your old address. Once it's set up, you can select this address in the "From" field when replying or forwarding.

It might take a while for Gmail to fetch everything from your old account, but the end result was definitely worth it for me.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager Since Google's applications are "in the cloud," we can act on feedback and release new features very rapidly. Sometimes, though, we like to listen and learn from users before launching updates to businesses, schools and organizations that use Google Apps. Gmail's revamped codebase was one such case, and we're happy to mention this update is now rolling out to Google Apps users who haven't already opted in to get the latest improvements. Employees, students and other Google Apps users will soon start seeing useful features like these:

• even faster interface
• group chat from the browser
• streamlined contact manager
• colored message labels
• improved keyboard shortcuts
• bookmarkable messages and searches

And if you want to stay up to date on the latest Google Apps improvements, our new RSS feed can help you learn about changes to Google Apps as they happen. To subscribe to this feed, click this "Add to Google" button: If you're a Google Apps administrator and you'd rather start getting new features right away instead of waiting, you can change a setting in the control panel to automatically get future features as they're released.

I recently discovered some little-known ways to use your Gmail address that can give you greater control over your inbox and save you some time and headache. When you choose a Gmail address, you actually get more than just "yourusername@gmail.com." Here are two different ways you can modify your Gmail address and still get your mail:

• Append a plus ("+") sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com.
• Insert one or several dots (".") anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses -- we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com. (We understand that there has been some confusion about this in the past, but to settle it once and for all, you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots.)

For me, the real value in being able to manipulate your email address is that it makes it really easy to filter on those variants. For example you could use hikingfan+bank@gmail.com when you sign up for online banking and then set up a filter to automatically star, archive or label emails addressed to hikingfan+bank. You can also use this when you register for a service and think they might share your information. For example, I added "+donation" when I gave money to a political organization once, and now when I see emails from other groups to that address, I know how they got it. Solution: filtered to auto-delete.

Tonight, we're starting to roll out the new version of Gmail in 37 languages.* As we first announced when we launched in English, this version, available for IE7 and Firefox 2, has an entirely new code base, which allows us to add new features more rapidly and share components with other Google applications (we now use the same rich text editor as Groups and Page Creator, and the contact manager can be seen in several Google apps). So if you were using English, you can now change your default language from the Settings menu to take advantage of a bunch of features that have recently launched in your preferred language, including:

• Colored labels
• Group chat
• Rich emoticons
• A new contact manager with a three-pane layout
• A number of smaller features, such as new shortcut keys and the ability to bookmark individual emails with your browser

One side effect of this change is that it may disrupt some third-party Gmail extensions -- unsupported scripts that directly modify Gmail's code. If you don't use them, you don't need to worry about this. But if you do, we've contacted a number of the developers behind some popular extensions and many of them have updated their scripts, so make sure you're using the latest version or check back with them if you encounter any issues. *The newest version of Gmail is not yet available for Croatian, Icelandic, Hebrew or Arabic, but you can continue using the older version in these languages. The newest version also is not yet available for Google Apps for your domain. Updated 4/22: We're still rolling out the new version of Gmail to all languages, and we're working to have it out to all users as soon as possible.

Since we added IMAP access to Gmail in October, we've heard from a number of Windows Mobile users that their Gmail IMAP experience wasn't great -- some were receiving blank messages and others could read headers but not entire messages. There are a lot of email clients out there, each with its own quirks, so making IMAP work across all of them can be tricky. We've worked with Microsoft engineers to debug the incompatibilities with Windows Mobile and made some tweaks to our code. As some people have already noticed, these fixes went out last week, so you should now have a better experience reading and sending Gmail messages using IMAP from your Windows Mobile device. If you haven't yet set up IMAP, just follow the configuration instructions to get started.