I managed to do so very easy. I set up my google mail in my iPad (in apples own mail app). I then also set up my iCloud mail. I waited for my whole account to download all of my gmail emails (like 20 years of mails). Then I just selected all and moved them into iCloud inbox. The mails were in my iCloud inbox (on iPad) nearly instantly, I was really amazed. Of course it took its time until it was all synced to my iCloud Storage and then downloaded to my phone, but it worked pretty easy actually. And it even got all the dates from my old mails right. Couldn’t have worked any better!
Edit: oh and I did this for 3 gmail accounts now. When I was done, I set up email forwarding to apples „hide my mail“ feature in all of them and selected delete gmail mail version after forwarding. This way I still get mails sent to my old mail accounts, without google knowing my new iCloud mail. Definitely recommend this.
oh, that edit tip is quite a good one, to set up the forward for the @gmail account to @icloud. that way I wouldn’t have to visit every place the mail was used to change it. however, it would be still good to do the full transition some day :D
Set your reply to email address to your iCloud email and add a like in your signature to get people to update their address book with your new email.
You will still need to log into each web service and change your email over though. At that point, might as well use “hide my email” for all of those web services (or to anyone really).
Maybe setup a rule so that all emails arrive to you via the forward from gmail will go into a different folder for you to review. At least for a bit. Maybe after a month or 2. You can fully transition over
BTW… If your Apple ID is linked to something other than an iCloud Mail keep in mind that you won’t be able to switch to an iCloud mail address as primary address for your Apple ID. I did all this transition last week and spoke to apple for like an hour. They told me there is no way to switch. So now my gmail is like the user name for my Apple ID, every mail that is sent to gmail now gets forwarded to an hide my mail email.
The problem was, that „hide my mail“ mails get normally forwarded to your primary Apple ID Mail address, in my case the gmail address. So what I did now was creating an iCloud mail over my iPhone‘s iCloud settings and then went to iCloud.com on my browser, where you then are able to switch the „hide my mails“ recipient address to the just created iCloud mail. Pretty complicated solution, but the only way to at least kind of get rid of my gmail address…
I already changed about a dozen services from my gmail address to my @me address, but I have a ton more I need to track down
I also set gmail to forward all emails to my @me address so I can monitor stragglers since I anticipate I will be getting emails to gmail for a while still
I managed to do so very easy. I set up my google mail in my iPad (in apples own mail app). I then also set up my iCloud mail. I waited for my whole account to download all of my gmail emails (like 20 years of mails). Then I just selected all and moved them into iCloud inbox. The mails were in my iCloud inbox (on iPad) nearly instantly, I was really amazed. Of course it took its time until it was all synced to my iCloud Storage and then downloaded to my phone, but it worked pretty easy actually. And it even got all the dates from my old mails right. Couldn’t have worked any better!
Edit: oh and I did this for 3 gmail accounts now. When I was done, I set up email forwarding to apples „hide my mail“ feature in all of them and selected delete gmail mail version after forwarding. This way I still get mails sent to my old mail accounts, without google knowing my new iCloud mail. Definitely recommend this.
oh, that edit tip is quite a good one, to set up the forward for the @gmail account to @icloud. that way I wouldn’t have to visit every place the mail was used to change it. however, it would be still good to do the full transition some day :D
Set your reply to email address to your iCloud email and add a like in your signature to get people to update their address book with your new email.
You will still need to log into each web service and change your email over though. At that point, might as well use “hide my email” for all of those web services (or to anyone really).
Maybe setup a rule so that all emails arrive to you via the forward from gmail will go into a different folder for you to review. At least for a bit. Maybe after a month or 2. You can fully transition over
BTW… If your Apple ID is linked to something other than an iCloud Mail keep in mind that you won’t be able to switch to an iCloud mail address as primary address for your Apple ID. I did all this transition last week and spoke to apple for like an hour. They told me there is no way to switch. So now my gmail is like the user name for my Apple ID, every mail that is sent to gmail now gets forwarded to an hide my mail email. The problem was, that „hide my mail“ mails get normally forwarded to your primary Apple ID Mail address, in my case the gmail address. So what I did now was creating an iCloud mail over my iPhone‘s iCloud settings and then went to iCloud.com on my browser, where you then are able to switch the „hide my mails“ recipient address to the just created iCloud mail. Pretty complicated solution, but the only way to at least kind of get rid of my gmail address…
strange this should work fairly easy: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8562259
Hmm… If i am Reading this right, my problem could have been, that my iCloud mail wasn’t created more than 30days ago. I will definitely try that.
I just wonder why apple support didn’t came up with that…
I will update once I tried (iCloud email is currently about 6/7 days old, so I will have to wait a while)
Oh and Thanks for that suggestion!
I literally switched my Apple ID from my gmail email address to my Apple @me.com email address today
@lackthought how did the switch go? Any friction or speed bumps?
it was smooth for me, I went to this address:
https://appleid.apple.com/account/manage
and that was pretty much it, now I can sign in with my @me address for Apple ID
I didn’t even need to log out on any of my devices, they display the @me address in the settings as my Apple ID instead of the gmail address
@lackthought, that sounds straight forward and easy. You ditching Google completely or just changing login?
trying to ditch google entirely
I already changed about a dozen services from my gmail address to my @me address, but I have a ton more I need to track down
I also set gmail to forward all emails to my @me address so I can monitor stragglers since I anticipate I will be getting emails to gmail for a while still