Pretty much everyone these days has more than one email account, usually more than one hand can count. Personally, I have 5+ accounts with different email service providers including Yahoo, Gmail, Cox, my office email, my website email, etc. Etc. I currently use Outlook to check all of its accounts from one client application because it makes it easy to manage.
If you are happy with Outlook, then you have no problem. However, if you prefer to use Gmail for everything as it works on the web and has better spam filtering and security, you might be interested in setting up and managing all of your Gmail email accounts from there.
In this article, I will explain how to use Gmail as your primary account to collect email from all of your other online accounts. First, log into your Gmail account and click on the little gear icon in the upper right corner. Select “Settings” from the menu.
Now go to the Accounts & Import tab and you will see two different options for importing emails into Gmail. One option is to import mail and contacts, and the other is to check mail from other accounts (using POP3).
This is a bit confusing, but luckily Google has a little page written about different ways to move an email to your Gmail account. Basically, you have to decide if you want to import only old emails, only new emails, or both old and new emails.
Option 1 is for getting old emails from another email provider in Gmail and for that you click the Import mail and contacts link in the Accounts and Import section. You can import email from Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, or any other email provider that allows POP3 access. When you click on the link, a new tab will open and you will be prompted to enter an email address for a different account.
Click “Continue” and you will receive a message that you need to sign in. to another email account to confirm the import. It also states that the process is performed by a third-party company ShuttleCloud and that the transfer may be unencrypted.
After signing in to another email account, click Continue. Depending on your email provider, a new window will appear asking you to confirm that ShuttleCloud can access all of your data.
After successful authorization, you will be prompted to close this window. Go ahead and do that, and in the previous window that you were in before, it will update and go to step 2, which is to choose what you want to import.
The last option is Import new mail for the next 30 days, so this option is really only useful for importing old emails from a client other than Gmail into your Gmail account. If you just want new emails to arrive in your account, you should choose the second option above, which is “Add a POP3 email account you own. I will explain this option later.
For now, click Continue and the import process will begin. If you are trying to migrate all your old email from another email provider and you also want all new email to arrive in your Gmail account, then it is best to uncheck the Import new mail for the next 30 days checkbox and then set up adding POP3 account separately. This way your old mail will be imported and new mails will be checked too.
If you have a lot of old emails, it can take up to several days to import them into your Gmail account. So where does all this imported email go? It’s good that you asked! Usually, when you expand the list of folders and shortcuts on the left side of Gmail, you will see that they are listed alphabetically along with everything else.
What’s really nice about importing using Gmail is that it converts all folders from your other accounts to shortcuts by simply taking all the emails and dumping them into one giant inbox. Now when you return to the Accounts and Imports section, you will see a few new options.
First, here you can see how the import is going. Since I had three whole emails in my Yahoo account, the import finished almost immediately. In the “Send Mail As” section, you will see that you can make your own different default email address for sending mail, but I’m not sure why you need this.
Finally, when replying to a message, it will automatically reply with your Gmail address because it assumes that you want people to start using that email address to contact you. However, if you don’t want to, you can choose to Reply from the same address the message was sent to, and when you reply to an email from a different email account, it will also reply from that email instead of your Gmail address.
It should also be noted that you can click the Delete button in the Send Mail section as you would for another email account, but this will not delete the actual emails that were previously imported. If you want to delete all imported emails, you need to go to the label, click the arrow next to it and select Remove label. It will then show you the label and any attached labels and confirm if you want to delete the emails.
To receive new emails to your Gmail account, you must start by adding the POP3 mail account you own from Accounts and Import. You will be prompted to enter an email address for a different account.
However, the next step is different from what we did when importing emails. This is where you enter your password and usually Google can automatically detect the POP server settings. You will also have several options, such as whether you want to leave a copy of the email on the server, whether you want to use SSL (recommended), whether you want to flag messages and whether you want to archive them.
If you leave the default as shown above, emails will appear in your Gmail inbox just like regular emails. When you’re done, click on the Add Account button. Also, it’s worth noting that any new unread emails in your inbox will also be imported to Gmail. In my case, a year ago, there was an unread email in my Yahoo account.
In addition to importing new emails, he imported this email and I couldn’t even find it in Gmail unless I searched for it because it was far behind in my inbox. Therefore, it’s worth tagging your incoming messages so you can easily find all emails from another email account in case a bunch of unread ones are imported as well.
The last thing you can do to get email in Gmail is to simply set up a forwarding from another email account to your Gmail account. You can set it up this way, but I prefer to use the two methods included with Gmail to get old and new emails. If you have any questions, please leave a comment. Enjoy!
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