Consolidate Email Accounts
"I have three email accounts, and it's a nuisance to check each one. I also have trouble keeping my address books in sync, and when I'm looking for a certain message, I have to check in three places. Is there an easy way to consolidate all my email accounts in one place?"
How to Move All Email and Contacts Into One Account
I understand your dilemma. For various reasons, people often end up with multiple email accounts on several hosts: Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. It gets confusing and hard to keep track of. It also takes a lot of time to check for new mail on all the services.
The good news is that it is possible to consolidate all those email accounts into one, without losing anything stored on the other services.
You'll probably want to keep all your email accounts active and receiving mail, at least for a while. Those addresses are out there and if people don't know your new address, they have no other way to reach you. But you want mail sent to Yahoo, AOL, etc., to be forwarded to your One Address. That way, you only need to log onto one place, saving lots of time. Simple is better.
I chose Google's Gmail for my One Address. It's reliable. The gmail.com name is a respected brand widely used by both personal and business users. Gmail is searchable in many useful ways, and its spam filter is highly effective. Best of all, Gmail now lets you consolidate all your other email accounts very easily.
You could just logon to all your email accounts, and send a change of address message to everyone in your address books. And you should do that, but it won't really help you consolidate everything without a lot of extra effort.
Of course you want to import to your One Address all your email contacts from the other services, AND your old email saved on those services. Gmail lets you do all that with a few simple steps.
Using Gmail's Import Feature
After logging into Gmail, in the upper right corner, click on Settings, then click the "Accounts and Import" tab. Next, click on "Import Mail and Contacts" and just follow directions. One by one, you will enter the email address and password for each of your other accounts.
You'll be given the option to import contacts and old mail; import new mail arriving at the old address for 30 days; and to add the old mail address to the imported mail as a tag to tell you where it came from. Click "Start Import" and go do the same for your other email accounts.
Google advises you that the import process may take several hours, even up to two days, before you start seeing imported mail. In actual practice, I started receiving imported old mail within minutes. Your experience may vary. But importing goes on without you, you don't even have to be logged on to Gmail.
Be forewarned that you will be inundated with "new" mail at your One Address during the import process. This is a good opportunity to review and delete old mail you really don't need, and keep the keepers. Since Gmail has a "filters" function, you may want to set up a rule that routes mail from each old account into a specified subfolder, rather than have everything pile up in your main Inbox.
From here on, you have only one webmail site to bookmark, and just one username and password to remember. Email checking will go much faster with only one account to check. And you'll have all your contacts and messages in one place.
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Posted by Bob Rankin on November 13, 2009 05:38 PM
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Article information: AskBobRankin -- Consolidate Email Accounts (Posted: November 13, 2009 05:38 PM)
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Copyright © 2005 - Bob Rankin - All Rights Reserved
Most recent comments on "Consolidate Email Accounts"
(See all 19 comments for this article.)Posted by:
DKong27
15 Nov 2009
I find that an easy way to keep track of all my e-mail addresses is to use Webmail Notifier for Mozilla Firefox. I never have to check manually, other than the occasional bug. Note that it only checks the Inbox and not the Spam folder.
Posted by:
LeeD
19 Nov 2009
"EDITOR'S NOTE: Gmail's import feature DOES bring in mail from other accounts. That's exactly what it's for!"
Like I said, GMail did NOT work with Mail.com accounts. But that is moot now -since Mail.com has since been merged with AOL Mail. So it should work now.
Posted by:
ben shearon
20 Nov 2009
The best feature in Gmail, in my opinion, is the ability to *send* from various accounts.
Once registered (see the settings tabs) you can receive forwarded email from other accounts and send email that looks like it came from those accounts.
I use this feature to get my work emails and emails from five different accounts all coming into my main account. Extremely useful.
Posted by:
Eric Bloch
20 Nov 2009
A better setup is AFTER you get everything into Gmail is to then go to each account you collect from and set them to automatically forward all email to the main Gmail address and shut off their Spam Filters . Of course then you shut off Gmail's option to go get the mail and you are relying on Gmails very good spam filter.
This method results in faster receipt because email will be forwarded as received instead of waiting for Gmail to request the mail.
You can also forward email from any other Gmail account to the prime account.
Posted by:
Randy
20 Nov 2009
I have been using Pop Peeper at home and Gmail import at work. They both work great!
Posted by:
David
20 Nov 2009
There are many people who for various reasons prefer to use POP mail and a whole generation who have grown up with webmail and don't even know there is such a thing as POP. It might just suit their needs (so 2007 or not!).
Posted by:
Phil
20 Nov 2009
You say "import new mail arriving at the old address for 30 days". What happens after 30 days?
Posted by:
geoffm
20 Nov 2009
I have 5 mail addresses and use POPTRAY to collect from all the servers, it's free and you can delete anything before it gets to your email program.
I have it set to check every 1 minuet and it displays results in the task bar, one click and you can see whats there before they get imported.
It doesn't consolidate address books but it's a good defence against spam ect.
Posted by:
T. Reynolds
20 Nov 2009
POP? Talk about 2007. If you're going to use gmail, use IMAP. I forward all email to one gmail account. As far as I can tell only Hotmail balks at forwarding directly to gmail. I make sure all the email is clean, sorted, junk removed and then use Thunderbird once a week or so to download everything from gmail via IMAP (leaving copies on the gmail server). Instant backup, labels and all. Gmail is pretty reliable but never put all your eggs in one basket. The chances of both your pc and gmail dying at the same time are slim.
Posted by:
Moshe
22 Nov 2009
I may be from the old school but I am quite happy with Outlook and have 3 accounts from different ISP's. I use MailWasher to filter out spam. In case I missed or deleted the wrong email, I have a month to go back and remail it to myself. The Pro version allows using numerous accounts. I then get all my email downloaded to my Inbox. This will work with gmail too.
I use the Xobni for searching my emails. It's freeware and quite effective.
I am thinking of opening a an IMAP account with my main ISP so that I can keep my stuff backed up off-site as well as being able to get to it from anywhere at anytime.