The feature is powered by TrueSwitch, a product that as its name implies makes it easy to switch from one provider to another.

More abstractly, I think business models which are predicated on reducing switching costs of customers in a given industry are interesting, because they lower the pain that another company is trying to maximize, and therefore is probably valuable to both the end-user and competitors in the industry (either of which may be willing to pay).

Another example I can think of is CellTrade, where users can get out of their cell phone contracts by trading them.

Anyone have other examples of this sort of business model?

During the current recession I've heard ads from various Financial Services firms in my city making it clear that their staff will do all of the paperwork in switching your super (401k) or other investments to them, at no cost.

Most Health Insurance countries here in Australia offer the same service, and then meta-provider iSelect also make it simple to compare and recommend where you switch to.

Regarding business model, it's basically a question of loyalty. If we pay you or one of our staff to help you switch, we want the pay-off to be revenue from you for a long period of time. That's fine if combined with decent client service or a loyalty program, but if you're just as crappy, and your industry starts making switching easier, it will cost you in the long run. Not the easiest way to get clients and make money.

It would be interesting to find purposely erected barriers.

Eventually most of these will be shaken up one way or another. Each is a potential place to create wealth.

What other services are people stuck with?

I hate to say this because it already gets plugged enough here, but YC is an example of it. One of its goals is to make switching from working for a big company to working for your own company easier.

Edit: My first negative-voted post! I'm puzzled (was it perceived as being anti-YC?), but don't worry, I'm not complaining.

FYI, this feature is only visible in the "Standard" AJAX version of Gmail... The HTML version has no option for importing...

It's too bad this feature does not work on importing from one Gmail account to another Gmail account. A few years ago I [accidently] got onto some e-mail spammers list and have been getting spam mails ever since!

I'd love to be able to migrate all my old Gmail e-mails to a new account (including my RSS feeds and stars from Google Reader). Maybe someday?

I've been trying to get my wife to switch from Hotmail to Gmail for years and I was excited by this development, but.. it doesn't help with the e-mail forwarding problem, alas :( There are some workarounds but they either involve money or third parties.

Of course, Microsoft is smart enough to realize that if they made forwarding available for free, there'd be a major exodus ;-)

Hotmail now has free POP3 so you can let Gmail download new email from your wife's Hotmail account. Shh, don't tell anyone!

I've been following this for a while and was under the impression that the POP3 access was a paid feature. Got a link to the free-ness?

nevermind:

http://www.liveside.net/main/archive/2009/03/13/pop3-technol...

I'm surprised that the other email providers have allowed the switch to be technically possible. Oversight by them, or intentional?

How could you possibly prevent this? If the user can access the emails at provider X, so can a webapp that has the username and the password.

Preventing it entirely would be difficult, but given a list of IPs belonging to Google and TrueSwitch, it would not be very hard to put some serious brakes on the feature. Even reverse DNS could mostly work.

Not necessarily. If they did do something like that it would be a pain to TrueSwitch but hardly the end of the line. All they'd have to do is embed a hidden a hidden iframe and parse with javascript. Then the webmail provider would have to implement iframe busting, then TrueSwitch would switch to an ajax request that parses the source and it would essentially turn into a massive arms race that I don't see the webmail provider winning.

So that is why Mom switched to Gmail today. Thanks, I had been wondering!