Do you have too many email accounts? Up until a few days ago, I did too. Every day I’d check several accounts for new messages, which took longer than I liked.
My tip for today is too merge all of your email down into one account. GMail, and Google Apps, make this fairly easy. If you have a domain, I recommend using Google Apps. It’s much cooler to have you@yourdomain.com instead of domainlessguy73@gmail.com.
Once your new GMail-based email account is set-up, head over to the “Accounts” tab on the settings screen. Here you will configure your account to be the one place you go to check your email.
There are two ways to get messages from your other email inboxes into the new one. You have POP/IMAP and you have forwards. Here’s what I did:
- I picked my NTugo.com email address (powered by Google Apps) to be my new main account.
- I used POP to pull all of the messages from my old GMail account to my new inbox. After all of the emails were transferred, I set them all to “read,” and set the GMail account to delete the messages from it’s inbox after NTugo Mail grabs them via POP. So now any message sent to my GMail account go to the NTugo inbox.
- I went to my web host’s control panel and changed my Webmaster-Source.com email account from a normal inbox to a forward. Now any emails that go to matt at webmaster source dot com go to my main email inbox.
- I repeated the previous two steps for my other email accounts.
- Now all my email goes to one place.
I recommend setting-up some filters to label incoming messages with a tag corresponding to the address the message was sent to.
People have been doing this for as long as Google has provided this service, so this is nothing new. I’m just passing on the advice.
