Use Gmail to Manage All Your Email Accounts…

Friday, August 31st, 2007 | Tech Help

Lets face it, most people today have an email address and many have more than one. Between work, home, your ISP and that old Hotmail or Yahoo account you got when you were 13, email addresses pile up quickly. You could setup Outlook Express (please never do this) or Mozilla Thunderbird (please use this if you have to use a desktop email client) and connect to all your accounts. But what happens when you are away from home or when your hard drive imploads? This is where Gmail comes to the rescue.

First you will need to get yourself a Gmail account. Go here to get one. Enter all the required info and make sure to choose a good email alias for yourself and log into Gmail for the 1st time.

Next you need to add all your email accounts so Gmail can fetch your mail. To do this you need to click on Settings in the upper right corner of the page.

Next click on the Accounts tab near the top of the page.

Now click on the Add Another Mail Account link.

Enter the email address you want to add.

Enter the account connection info you were given by the email provider and click Add Account. You also can apply a label to the incoming messeges and choose whether to leave a copy on the remote server.

If everything was entered correctly you will now see the account listed. You can add up to 5 other email accounts using your Gmail email address. If you just wanted to collect all your email into one inbox you are done. But what if you want to send an email as one of your other accounts? Gmail has you covered there as well.

Just above where you added your email addresses you will see Send mail as. The process here is very similar to the previous steps.

Click on Add another email address.

Enter the display name and email address of the account.

Confirm the details and click on Send Verification. This sends an email to the email account you are moving to Gmail. In this email there will be a verification code.

You can either click on the link in the verification email or copy and paste the code into the blank field and click verify.

Once this is complete you can now receive email from an external account as well as reply to email coming from this account and have it sent with the correct reply-to address. No one will know you are using a web application to keep track of all your email accounts(¹). To top it all off this Gmail account has 2895MB of storage and very good spam filtering built in. This is a very handy feature that I use every day to keep track of my many email accounts.

*Note: When sending or replying to an email that is not from your Gmail email address the recipient may see the following:

After doing some research on the web I found the following statement:

Note: your Gmail address will still be included in your email headers in the sender field, to help prevent your mail from being marked as spam. Most email clients do not display the sender field, though some versions of Microsoft Outlook may display “From customaddress on behalf of yourusername.”

I do not need to hide my Gmail address so this is not much of a concern for me but if you do not want people to see your Gmail address this will be an issue.