YAY!

I just made a backup/transfer of about half of my hotmail account! I will finish tomorrow, but for now, I have copied most of it to my HDD and have put about 1/5th of it in my gmail account. For those who are interested, I used a javascript program from source forge called mrpostman (which allows you to contact webmail accounts like Yahoo and hotmail with a pop3 client and thus can be used to back up your e-mail to a hard drive from hotmail or yahoo. You do need to change the port from 11110 to 110 unless your pop3 client lets you change it from 110 to 11110. (Being java, it is avaliable for essentially any platform, even for the technically challanged. Yay!!! You will need the Java Runtime environment though) I then used Eudora (if you aren't transfering to another account, any pop3 client will do, but Eudora is one of the only ones with a well functioning redirect system. Thunderbird's redirect is broken.) The first thing to do in eudora is set it up to grab hotmail. It is similar to setting up any other account in eudora. Your smtp server (or whatever) does have to allow redirection. Mine did. Yay again! Next create a filter (I called mine opopopopopopopopopoo and filtered for that line in the subject heading) to redirect incomming mail to your gmail account. Then check your mail. Oh in both MrPostman and Eudora remember to tell it to leave the email on the server. It only checks the first page of your inbox, so with hotmail, you can transfer 100 messages at a time.
If you need more detailed instructions, just ask.