One Gmail Address to Rule Them All

Here’s a new Gmail trick I recently picked up. You can use your Gmail address as an email client to send and receive email from all of your other email addresses. Stop wasting your time checking multiple email addresses each day and do it all from Gmail. And all of your non-Gmail accounts inherit Gmail’s incredible spam filtering.

To set this up:

1. Log into your main Gmail account
2. Click “Settings” in the upper right hand corner
3. Choose the “Accounts and Import” tab
4. Start with the “Import Mail and Contacts” section and run through the prompts for each of your email addresses that you’d like to integrate (your other email service should give you all the POP3 info you need)
5. Then move on to the “Send Mail As” section. In this section, make sure to use the “Send through [whatever domain is associated with the email address] SMTP servers” if you don’t want the Gmail address you’re using as your email client revealed to the contacts you correspond with via your other email addresses (your other email service should give you all the SMTP info you need)

I’ve got this set up to integrate everything except my work email and only because I don’t want to be expected to do work related tasks when I’m away from my office.

I’ve also got it set up so that each email address gets it’s own label so that if I do want to view my emails by what address they are associated with then it is easy to do. And I’ve set up the “Quick Links” labs features to save searches for “is:unread to:[email address]” for each of my email addresses so I can check just one particular address if I so desire.

This set up has already drastically reduced the time I spend checking various email addresses and I won’t miss any emails sent to my infrequently used addresses anymore. Rather than having to do every action involved with checking email 3x or more each time I want to check my email, I can now do it all just once.

Related posts:
IMAP for Gmail and your Mac or iPhone

Google Apps: How to Use your Domain Name Email Address with Gmail

Using Labels and Filters in Gmail

Tagged as: email, gmail, google