Send and receive other email accounts using Gmail

Love them or hate them, Google’s email service is excellent. One thing it allows you to do is to send email using a different email address through your Gmail account. This can be useful for sending email from a work address without having to deal with a substandard web interface, or getting around configuration limitations of you existing email system without changing your address.

Here is how to do it:

Sending

  1. Log in; click on Settings and then select the “Accounts” tab
  2. Click on “Add another email address you own”
  3. In the popup window, enter your name and your work email address.
  4. Click on “Specify a different ‘reply-to’ address.” (the default seems to be to reply to the Gmail account regardless of which address you sent from)
  5. Add your work email address in the reply-to field
  6. Open you work email and find the confirmation code; either paste this into the pop-up window, or click the confirmation link.
  7. Back on the “Accounts” tab in Gmail, make sure that under “When receiving a message:” you select “Reply from the same address to which the message was sent”.
  8. Now when you click “Compose Mail” in Gmail, you should find a drop-down box in the “From” field allowing you to choose either the Gmail address or your work address to send from.

Receiving

Now when someone receives an email from you sent in this way and hits “reply”, it will reply to your work address. There are two ways to get this reply — and other messages sent to your work address — into your Gmail account; one from the Gmail end, and the other from your original email end:

  1. Use POP3/IMAP: You can configure Gmail to check your email in much the same way as an offline email program like Thunderbird or Apple Mail does. Simply click on Settings, then the “Accounts” tab, and click on “Add a mail account you own” under “Get mail from other accounts”. Then enter your old email address, followed by your POP email settings. It gives you options to leave a copy of messages on the server and some other options.
  2. Set up a rule in your old email account to forward all email automatically to the Gmail address. Obviously, the method varies according to provider.

Leave a Reply