Gmail Tip of the Day – Consolidate All of Your Email Accounts into Gmail

In an orgy of admiration for Gmail and love for its new Task function (and possible an over-rush of endorphins) I declared the week to be Gmail appreciation week around here at Enquiring Mimes Ranch. In that spirit, today we’ll explain another way to increase your productivity due to the general wonderfulness of Gmail.

Do you have a few old email address that you rarely check and when you do, you find they are chocked full of spam and maybe one halfway-important message that you’ve missed and you’re going to have to write one of those crow-eating messages that say something like “sorry I missed your message, I don’t read email in that account very often?” Gmail to the rescue.

You can have Gmail get the mail from other accounts, pull the messages into your Gmail account and throw away the spam. If you do find a treasure you can answer the message directly from Gmail so that it will look like you send the reply from your other account.

Tutorial after the jump

Here’s how:

Within Gmail select Settings – Account – Get Mail from Other Accounts – Add an account, enter your email address and press next step.

Enter your username and password, Gmail will probably guess your pop server name. Your choice as to whether to leave the retrieved messages on the server, but if you really don’t use the account very often — don’t leave them there.

Let Gmail create a label for that mailbox. This is very handy for viewing all messages from the retrieved account. Press Add Account, you’re halfway there.

Now lets set it up so we can send mail using Gmail from that account.

From Gmail choose Settings – Accounts – Send Mail As – Add email address

You can change the name that is displayed when you send email messages, by default you’re shown the same name as is used for your Gmail. Then add the new email address for the account that Gmail is now going to retrieve and hit Next Step.

You’ll then be asked to send an email to the old account to verify that it is yours. Since Gmail will retrieve the message, press Send Verification and just wait until it appears in your Gmail account and press the link in the message to verify your address. You’re almost there.

Okay, one last detail and we’re done. One more time, go to Settings – Accounts and check the bottom of the page to see that “Reply from the same address” is select as below, and you’re finished.