How to make your life easier with Gmail
I have 5 email accounts that I wanted to be able to answer from a single email client. I had run a mashed-up email scenario successfully in the past using Thunderbird, but I was getting tired of the giant size of my email files being stored on my local drive, and using IMAP only solves one of my email account problems, since it's not available for all my accounts. I also wanted to be able to send and receive email on my phone and other devices, from the instructor workstation in my classroom (such as right now while students are taking an exam), and have access to all my old mail during all these times. Finally, I wanted to be able to switch the "send as" address in my client so that mail could appear to be coming from any of my 5 email addresses.
Enter Gmail.
Here's what to do to get your mail to bend to your will.
1. Create a Gmail account
2. Under "settings | accounts" set up all your other accounts that you want Gmail to check. It will send an email to each of these places making sure that you actually own these accounts.
3. Set Gmail to fetch the email from these places. Leave "leave a copy on server" UNchecked.
4. Set up your return address that you want to be the default, and set up your "reply to" addresses. This is all in "settings".
Note that this is not a forwarding arrangement. No mail is being "forwarded" anywhere. It's just that Gmail is fetching your mail for you from multiple places.
The ONLY thing I don't like about this Gmail setup is that you can't configure gmail to check your mail at a specific interval. No more "check for new mail every ___ minutes". So, there is sometimes a short delay between when the mail comes into the account, and when Gmail finally goes to get it. Google says they use some sort of sophisticated algorithm to determine when to go get my mail based on how often I've gotten new mail in the past. I haven't noticed this to be the case. It seems like they check every 30-45 minutes or so, and a deluge of mail on one or two pickups doesn't seem to affect this timing. Maybe I'm just not noticing the sophistication here, ha ha.
I've been using this setup since August and I like it a lot.
Enter Gmail.
Here's what to do to get your mail to bend to your will.
1. Create a Gmail account
2. Under "settings | accounts" set up all your other accounts that you want Gmail to check. It will send an email to each of these places making sure that you actually own these accounts.
3. Set Gmail to fetch the email from these places. Leave "leave a copy on server" UNchecked.
4. Set up your return address that you want to be the default, and set up your "reply to" addresses. This is all in "settings".
Note that this is not a forwarding arrangement. No mail is being "forwarded" anywhere. It's just that Gmail is fetching your mail for you from multiple places.
The ONLY thing I don't like about this Gmail setup is that you can't configure gmail to check your mail at a specific interval. No more "check for new mail every ___ minutes". So, there is sometimes a short delay between when the mail comes into the account, and when Gmail finally goes to get it. Google says they use some sort of sophisticated algorithm to determine when to go get my mail based on how often I've gotten new mail in the past. I haven't noticed this to be the case. It seems like they check every 30-45 minutes or so, and a deluge of mail on one or two pickups doesn't seem to affect this timing. Maybe I'm just not noticing the sophistication here, ha ha.
I've been using this setup since August and I like it a lot.
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