How to migrate your old email accounts to Hotmail or Gmail

It's that time of year again when colleges are set to close for the summer break, students will be graduating -- as will I -- and these budding new graduates will be hoping to enter the world of work.

I laugh, but surprisingly, many of my student colleagues are lucky enough to have landed themselves their dream job already. Others, however, are burger flipping at the local fast food joint.

What is, however, a pertinent reminder to many, that your college email accounts may undergo a change in the coming weeks and months.

And you may not like either of them.

Image via Flickr.

Some email accounts become 'alumni accounts', which enable you to receive email but alters your address to reflect these changes. Some colleges may even charge a fee to keep your email account running.

Yet some institutions, most of those which have yet to outsource their emails to the cloud, will bump you off the system altogether and you will lose all of your emails of the past three or four years.

Gallery An in-depth walk-through guide to export your old email account to a brand new shiny one in Hotmail, Gmail or any other email account. Check out the gallery here.

To hold onto your email, thrown together over the weekend is this handy run-through guide for students -- and employees in the big, bad world alike -- to transfer your email to a Hotmail or Gmail account.

In practice, you can move your email anywhere using this guide, and it does not have to be limited to Hotmail or Gmail. As so many students use either Hotmail or Gmail, it seems only fitting to please the masses this time around.

Related content:

• Gallery: Outlook Web App in the Live@edu environment
• Live@edu rebranded: Introducing Office 365 for Education
• Microsoft: Live@edu email not encrypted on cloud servers
• Google Apps adds anti-spam: Student email war continues
• Google Apps and Facebook's recent inbox controversies

More from the column:

• Your email address says more about you than you think
• Email paranoia and the out-of-office subculture
• Generation Y: 'Email is unfashionable and outdated'
• Generation Y: Breaking up online is hard to do