I've spent the last 2 days transferring my in-laws email from webtv (hotmail) to gmail. It couldn't go directly so I had to use Outlook Express. I created a hotmail account and a Gmail IMAP account, downloaded all the mail, manually moved it to Gmail then synched that with the online account. Gmail automagically sorted all the mail into its 'conversation's, and added most of the email addresses to contacts. Since Gmail uses labels and not folders it went ahead and labeled everything with names that match the folders.
It would have been easier if I could pull everything down in hotmail nd update the hotmail account settings to point to Gmail but in OE I couldn't change the server type on an MSN/hotmail account for whatever reason. I wanted to use Thunderbird but it doesn't have native http (hotmail) mail server support and for whatever reason the required extension couldn't be downloaded.
It would have been easier if I could pull everything down in hotmail nd update the hotmail account settings to point to Gmail but in OE I couldn't change the server type on an MSN/hotmail account for whatever reason. I wanted to use Thunderbird but it doesn't have native http (hotmail) mail server support and for whatever reason the required extension couldn't be downloaded.