I have a lot of different email addresses. I like being able to respond from a single email program (I currently use Thunderbird) and also from a Web mail account when I'm away from my computer (I currently use Gmail). Some of my email accounts are simply forwarded to my primary email account, but sometimes I like to keep each of the accounts separate. For these accounts I've configured Gmail to collect my email from each of my full email accounts. This is especially handy if your main computer is set up to collect the email directly into something like MS Outlook and you want to be able to read/send mail while on the road by logging into your Gmail account.
I used the following steps to set up the email collection:
- Log into Gmail. Click on the "Settings" links (top right). Choose "Accounts and Imports" tab.
- Scroll down to "Check mail using POP3." Click on "Add POP3 email account." A new window will open.
- Enter the email address that you would like to read from your Gmail account. Click "Next Step."
- Enter your username, password and the POP server (usually something like mail.DOMAINNAME.com). Depending on how I want to process the mail I sometimes leave a copy of the message on the server. I do, however, always add a "Label" for incoming messages so that I can easily see which emails are sent to each of the (many) email accounts that I have. Once you've configured the settings the way you'd like click the button "Add account."
- Gmail will then try to log into that email account with the user name and password you've provided.
Mail collected using this method is generally picked up by Gmail once an hour. You can force Gmail to collect mail when log into your account by going back to the settings back and clicking the link "Check mail now."
To send emails as the new email address click on the link Settings, navigate to the tab labelled, "Accounts & Imports" and choose "Send Mail As..." Follow the on-screen instructions to validate your email address.
