Transfer Bell Email to Gmail Accounts: Forward All Data
If you still have an active email address with a @bell.ca domain, it’s the right time to switch. And there is no better alternative than Gmail. If you wanted to do this migration before, but technical difficulties kept pushing the date further and further, no worries. We will teach you how to transfer your Bell email to Gmail account in a few easy steps. But before that, let us see what makes Gmail a user’s favorite and Bell email not so much.
Why Transfer Bell Email to Gmail?
There is a limited set of reasons why a user may choose Gmail over their still-active Bell mail account. These can be classified into either pull factors that attract users towards Gmail or push factors that send users away from the Bell mail system.
- Top-notch security of Gmail is quite well known to prevent spam, fraud, and scam emails from entering your inbox.
- A Gmail account has a massive 15 GB storage in its free tier, which increases exponentially as you get more premium plans.
- Presence of a complete suite of solutions apart from the mail you get, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and much more.
Users want to get rid of their Bell mail because of:
- Lacklustre User Interface coupled with a frustrating app setup, which is difficult to operate and manage for non-technical users.
- No clear storage boundary; all of a sudden, you start to receive messages from Bell that “email communication will cease, delete mails”.
- Questionable security and spam filtering can lead to the right emails getting blocked and the wrong emails getting into the inbox.
Now, let us see how you, as a user, can transport all emails from a Bell account to Gmail for free.
Use Gmail to Fetch Mail From a @Bell.ca Domain
Gmail has a built-in feature hidden within the settings options that allows the complete capture of any IMAP-based email account.
Open the new Gmail account where you want the Bell Mail data to appear.
At the top right corner, you will see a cog icon. Click on it.
From the Quick settings fly-out menu, select See all settings
When you have all the setting options visible, switch over to the Accounts and Import tab.
There you will see many different settings, each of which sounds like it could do the job, but may end up jeopardizing the project. So it becomes important that you select the correct option.
Which is Import mail and contacts. As soon as you click it, a small yellow box will appear in the top left side of your screen. Complete the on-screen instructions put in whatever credentials are asked for.
If everything is done correctly, a new label (a Folder equivalent of Gmail that behaves like a tag as well) is made on your sidebar.
It will contain all the emails that were there on the Bell mail account.
You will not see all the emails appear at once; they arrive in batches, which are in reverse chronological order.
This means the newest emails from your Bell inbox will arrive in Gmail first.
Best Practices During Manual Email Import From Bell to Gmail
This is a list of dos and don’ts one must follow while attempting a self-managed Bell Email to Gmail transfer.
A simple trick that you could do is sort emails in reverse order in both Bell Mail and Gmail accounts. This will allow you to visually track if all the emails, even from the earliest period, have arrived or not.
Other settings in Gmail that are helpful in such email switching situations are the “Send as” (here you can add your @bell.ca ID if you continue to have conversations with the same ID). It is helpful if you plan on remaining with Bell for your internet services, but just get rid of their archaic email system.
Don’t forward emails; it will cause more problems than solutions. Plus, there is no way to bulk send multiple emails to a single recipient in Bell Mail web UI or any external email client. So you have to do all emails one by one. Which is quite time-consuming and error-prone, you could easily miss some emails.
Double-check/triple-check that all the emails are available inside Gmail. Especially if you plan on switching providers, i.e., end Bell service. As all your emails would be deleted with no way of recovery.
Forget Forwarding and Transfer Bell Mail to Gmail With a Tool
Using the SysTools IMAP Migration utility, anyone with minimal technical know-how can pull emails from a Bell mail account and add them to a Gmail account. Use the demo to relocate 100 emails.
In five quick steps, you can
- Open the software, check the Email workload, and apply a date filter if you need.
- Now, select Others as the IMAP Server in the Source IMAP Account section, fill in the server URL imap.bell.net.
- After that, under the Destination IMAP Account section, choose Gmail, Validate, and hit Next.
- Then, download the CSV template, edit it, and Import Users.
- Preview > Select > Prioritize (optional) > Validate users in the same way we did for Shaw to Gmail migration.
- Tap on “Start Migration”.
Conclusion
So here in the write-up, we told you that transferring Bell email to Gmail is a manageable process. Doing it correctly gives you access to a more modern and feature-rich platform.
All you need to do is use Gmail’s Mail Fetcher, and you can move all your past emails efficiently.
If, for some reason, you have many different Bell email accounts that you are looking to move at once, the best way out will be the utility talked bout in this eGuide.