Lifehacker:
First, login to your old account and
go to Settings -> Forwarding and
POP/IMAP. In the POP Download section
choose to enable POP for all mail and
then save your changes.
After you do that, you'll have a new
option in the POP Download section to
Enable POP for all mail. Since you
want to import every piece of mail
into your new account, you want to
select this option and again save your
changes.
Now it's time to import all of those
messages into your new email account.
Log out of your old account and then
log in to your new Gmail account. This
time go to Settings -> Accounts. In
the Get mail from other accounts
section, click on Add another mail
account. Just step through the setup
(the screenshot above is actually
importing from my Google Apps
Lifehacker Gmail account, but the
settings are basically the same for a
regular Gmail import) and you're done.
Now it's just a matter of waiting.
Gmail will use the POP access you set
up on your old account to download
every single message in your old
account to your new one. When it's
done, all your old emails will be
instantly searchable from your new,
non-lame email address. If you ever
get wistful for your old account, you
can always associate that address with
your new one and send email from it
whenever you want.
Once the initial POP import completes,
you may want to consider heading back
to your old account and disabling the
POP access in favor of turning on
forwarding of all new mail, also
available in the Forwarding and
POP/IMAP tab of the settings. This
will ensure that all new mail sent to
your old address will get there as
soon as it's received.
