In response to my post on Monday about How I Use Google To Organize My Entire Online Digital Life, I received several requests for a write-up on how I have all 10 of my email accounts inside my main Gmail account. It’s actually quite a simple process, and I will do my best to explain it here.
Inside Gmail, there are actually two things you are going to need to do – set up your account to Get Mail From Other Accounts, and set up your account to Send Mail As. You can do each part separately, but if you start with Get Mail From Other Accounts, it automatically asks if you if you wish to be able to send mail as well. It definitely simplifies things! OK, let’s get started.
Get Mail From Other Accounts & Send Mail As
1. Inside your main Gmail account, click on “Settings” up on the upper right.
2. In the next window, click on “Accounts”
3. Scroll down to the second box titled “Get Mail From Other Accounts”.
4. Click on “Add a mail account you own”.
5. A window will pop up asking for the email address you want to add, type it right in there and click Next Step.
6. On the next page, fill in the appropriate information for that account. If it is a Gmail account, user pop.gmail.com for the POP server. I unclick all option boxes except “Always use a secure connection”.
7. The next window will say (if you did it correctly) “You can now retrieve mail from this account. Would you also like to be able to send mail as “youremailaddress”? Click Yes if you do, or No if you don’t.
8. I will assume you clicked Yes, as that is what this tutorial is for. Click Next Step if this is the case.
9. The next window will ask you for the information about this email account you are adding. Enter your name or what you want mail recipients to see when they receive mail from your new account. You can also specify a different “Reply-to” address here, which I would not do. Click Next Step.
10. You should now see a message saying “Before you can send mail as “youremailaddress”, we need to verify that you own this email address. Click on “Send Verification”, and then go check that extra account you are adding to your main account for the verification email.
11. Got it? Great. You can either click on the link in the email you just got in your other account, or you can copy and paste the verification code in the window you were working in. Click Verify…and you are done!
Now, inside your main Gmail account, start composing a new email to anyone. You will see that you can now select which email address you want to send the mail from. Pretty cool, right? And any emails sent to your other email account(s) will arrive in this main account. I have all 10 of my accounts both sent to and enabled to send from my main Gmail account, and it has definitely made my life easier. Hope this helps you guys, and let me know if you have any questions!
I do this as well, but I warn you – sending from your other accounts through the main one does not always work like you think. I have a main email account as well as an official one with my full name that I use for job applications, etc. I discovered that many of my emails were going through as “mainaccount@gmail.com on behalf of Rebecca LastName”, rather than “rebeccalastname@gmail.com.” I wasn’t hiding my real account name from anyone!
I did this just now and can’t thank you enough!!
Rebecca, yes, that can happen. Supposedly it will be fixed, but it doesn’t always happen. It depends on who/what program is receiving the mail, I believe.
Glad it worked Emily!
Another thing you might want to point out is that although this works well if you have multiple gmail accounts, some servers, Yahoo particularly, (not sure about how hotmail works), will block pop access unless you pay a yearly fee. For Yahoo that is $20.00. Some people might think its worth it to do that.
Thanks Michele. I actually have one of those paid yahoo accounts that I aim into my Gmail account too. Not sure why I still have it, but I do! Hotmail used to be like that too, but they finally enabled free POP access.
I had the same issue Rebecca noted, I solved it by creating a new Gmail account just for the purposes of checking that work email. that way when I sent, it was from “jessework@gmail” instead of my personal account…convoluted I know, but it worked.
Thanks for the write up David! I’m actually going to forward this post to my mom who is in the process of realizing that she needs to get off Yahoo mail…this will help alot!
Jesse
Will this work if I use Thunderbird email client?
Would I just set up Thunderbird to pull the main gmail account info?
Thanks for the info, I’ve been trying to do something like this for awhile.
Yes, all the emails will show up in Thunderbird if you set it to pull everything from Gmail. The tricky part is setting up Thunderbird so you can also send from all those email addresses, which I don’t know how/don’t know if it is possible.
@Kurt –
You would have to set up Thunderbird to actually IMAP each account separately…Basically what David’s write up shows you how to do is use Gmail as your email client, while you are talking about using Thunderbird as your client instead. There is not a way to send from thunderbird unless it has the specific settings entered for each account in question.
Did that make sense? It’s still early…
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!
This should make my life less cluttered because I can now check 5 e-mails at once….yeah!
~Shelley
I really don’t even know how I ended up right here, but I believed this write-up was great. I do not recognize what person you are however surely you’re going to a popular blogger if you are not now 😉 Regards!