Have you got a multitude of email addresses? Wouldn’t it be great to have them all together in one single place, that you can also check on the fly using just a web browser? No more Outlook, Thunderbird, and all those things?
Google’s own Gmail is simply the best webmail application ever: I have been using Gmail since it was in the invite-only beta phase, and it has been adding features over these years, coming to be an almost-perfect email web based client, and one of the best things it does, is the ability to send emails pretending to be another account, on a different domain and server. That’s what we will use in this mini-guide to transform a single Gmail account into an all-in-one email client for all of your address (that support forwarding).
Here’s how to do it:
- Set up your other email(s) to forward to your desired Gmail account: to do this, you will simply have to look up into your settings panel. If you are using a hosted solution, as it is for your own domain, you can control mail forwarding within your control panel, or ask your host’s customer service to do it for you.
- Set up Gmail to “send as” your alternative email address: go to Settings–Accounts, and under “Send mail as,” click “Add another email address.” Enter your name and alternative email address here. You may also add a “reply to” address if you want your users to reply to a different email by default.
- The next step will be to validate your address: you will be asked to paste a verification code, in order to prove that this is really your account you are using: if you have correctly set up the forward on step one, you will receive the email directly in Gmail.
And that’s it! Now every email that’s sent to your old email address will be automatically forwarded to Gmail, and you will also be able to reply as if you were still using that email: to do this, everytime you compose a new email there’s a drop-down box from which you can choose the email that will result as the “sender” email. You can also select a default replying address in the “Settings” page
For any doubt just leave a comment below!
Photo Credit: Mailbox – Clix, Gmail Stamp – Marcofolio.net
