How to Consolidate Email Accounts - Comments Page 2

Yes! I see the value in consolidating accounts. Meanwhile, I do keep one account, which is for online purchases and it behaves as a "lightning rod" to direct spam away from my "genuine" accounts. Every couple of years I delete that account and set up a new "spam" account - and repeat that cycle. I receive almost NO spam on my good accounts!

I am totally with Kevin - Google is too intrusive so I use Thunderbird.
Bob - you write that gmail spam filters work well - not in my experience, too many good emails from frequently used sources end up in spam (and thusly do not make it to Thunderbird) and Google delete them after thirty days, necessitating a visit (for each address)once a month to the gmail site to ensure something really important isn't in spam. No way to turn off the spam filter, neither. If you had to pay for gmail, you wouldn't stand for their poor performance.

I have 9 different email accounts, genealogy takes up 3, then my wife has 2 and the rest are mine depending on whether it is my Church address or my American Legion address, or a private family address. All are in Thunderbird, I have not problem as I download my emails in the course of the day. It works well and I archive that which I want to keep and trash the rest. All in one account on my 1 terabyte disk drive. I backup every day, to the cloud and on a terabyte hard drive attached to my computer.

Thank you, Kevin, and the answer to 'maybe Stephen's?' is no. Within Thunderbird, I have no problem selecting the correct from address. My question was aimed folks who wish to use any web-based email address such as gmail and how do they then send from a particular address if all their accounts are being auto-forwarded to their new main one. It was a question of curiosity, as I have no plans to move off of T-bird or the desktop Outlook program.

I too would highly recommend Thunderbird. It's tremendously versatile and its folders viewing options are excellent. You can easily see all your unread messages in every account, favorite folders, recent folders etc.

After about fifteen years, I've just stopped using (UK ISP) VirginMedia's webmail which collected from all my other email addresses too: like gMail, hotMail et alia. I recently left Virgin, so I had to edit many folders of saved emails and forward them to my new non-ISP address: an especially long and tedious job as Virgin only allows forwarding of six at a time. I've gone back to ThunderBird: which does a better job of collecting and sending from all my other email accounts - EXCEPT gMail. Google apparently thinks T'Bird is insecure, so it won't allow T'Bird to log into it to collect MY emails.
I had already long avoided that cash-distorted google search, and have recently been inadvertently mis-led by google's cross-device "syncing" which distorted and/or deleted many of my personal files on both phone and laptop. Thus I have increasing anxiety in the real motive behind Google's omnipresent and would-be omnipotent activities. Of course I've minimised use of my gMail address to logging into google for gMaps.
Long live collaborative non-profit programming: GO Mozilla! GO LibreOffice!
Please remember such wonderful free-to-user projects need a small donation from time to time.

as if google needed more of (your) data to weed-whack thru; above and beyond (your) gmail account data... jeez, enuf already...