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Using Gmail as a Universal Email Account

Feb 09, 2007

I seem to have too many email addresses. There’s my main personal account tied to this site, there’s one for my freelance web development company, one for my day job, one for my email newsletter company, one for my hosting company, and a few others for one reason or another. Add to that the fact that I use 2 or 3 computers on a regular basis and you can imagine that checking email can be a royal pain.

I started looking around for an email application that could be used to check and send from all of my accounts and could be accessed from multiple computers. That’s when I stumbled upon the ability to send from different addresses within Gmail. I’ve been trying it for a little while and so far it seems to work good but I’m not completely sold on it yet. At any rate, here’s how it’s done.

How to Set it Up

  1. You’ll need to setup your email accounts to forward to your Gmail account. Most hosts allow you to setup email forwarding through your control panel (Cpanel, Plesk, etc.) and it should be quite easy to find. If you can’t seem to figure it out, ask your host.
  2. Next, you’ll need to setup Gmail to allow you to “send as” your alternative email address. Go to Settings -> Accounts -> “Send mail as”. Click “Add another email address”. Enter your name and email address here.
  3. Click on “Next Step”, then “Verify”. You’ll receive an email at your alternative email adress with the verification link and code.
  1. That’s it! You are done.

Now when somebody writes you at your alternative address, it’ll forward to your Gmail account. When you’d like to compose a new message, you will be presented with a drop-dwown menu from which you can choose which address you’d like to use as your sending address. You can also setup your account to reply using a default address or using the email address that the email was sent to.

As you can see, this has the potential to really consolidate things and make checking and sending email more efficient for folks that have multiple email addresses.

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