One email to rule them all

There was a recent Tip over on the Gmail blog that I wanted to pass on to all my readers (both of you). If you’re like me, you probably have several email accounts that you’ve accumulated over the years. I still have my email account from ASU but have dropped others like my old Lycos email and a couple of ISP provided addresses that I never really used. But I have several blogs which means several email accounts to manage them.

If you haven’t been using Gmail then you’re probably not getting the most out of your email time. There are lots of features that make Gmail so productive but the one that makes it so useful for me is the ability to use multiple emails from one account. Basically, all my emails are routed through my Gmail account but still appear to come from their own email accounts.

There are two steps to make this happen:

1. Set up mail forwarding or fetching
Many email providers offer free auto-forwarding to other accounts. Log into your non-Gmail account and set your Gmail address as the forwarding target. If your other account doesn’t offer forwarding but supports POP3 access, you can use Mail Fetcher in Gmail to automatically check your other account for new mail and download it to Gmail.

2. Set up custom “From:”
Gmail’s custom “From:” feature lets you send mail with one of your other email addresses listed as the sender in place of your Gmail address. There’s a good step-by-step for how to set this up in the Help Center, but the basics are adding the address you want to use and then verifying that it belongs to you. Once you have your custom “From:” set up, you can pick which address you want to reply from in the “From:” address drop down while composing messages.