Do you have multiple email accounts and find that you bounce between them during the day? Do you ever struggle trying to find an email and can’t remember which account it was sent to? Gmail is a great tool on its own. But with a few minuets of set up, it can be an excellent email management tool.
Consider this: You can have all of your email from other accounts forwarded to your Gmail or Google Apps email account, sort them by account as they come in, and have them displayed in their own inbox using the multiple inbox feature in Gmail. Even better you can set up filters to have the emails tagged as they come in.
The benefit to this is when we are searching for an email, it can be found in one place using Gmail’s search. Another benefit is that ALL our email is available from any access point, any computer, any phone, or any other device that can connect to the web.
How to do this:
- Visit each of your email accounts and have the email forwarded to your Gmail or Google Apps Email address.
- In your Gmail account, Click “Settings” in the upper right hand corner and click the “Multiple Inbox” link.
- In the Search query box ( I leave “Is:Starred” in the first box for quick access to email that I tag with a star.) enter “To:YourEmailAddress@Domain.com” in the panes in the order you would like the inboxes displayed.
Your done. If you like you can go ahead and create some filters while you are there. I suggest doing it on the fly as emails come in. There is a little checkbox at the last page of creating the filter that will allow you to apply the filter to emails in the past.
Google allows you also to change the “Send from” mail address so it appears that you sent the email from the original email account. This “From” email address does not even have to be a Gmail address. Under Settings, Click “accounts, then click the link “add another email address you own” You will 
be asked to enter your email address. Follow the instructions carefully to confirm you own that email address. You will be sent a confirmation code to the added email address that you need enter to complete the setup.
If you are using Gmail and want access to the past email stored in your other accounts you can import them. You contacts can also be exported and imported into Gmail Contacts. If you are using Google Apps, ask your Google Apps administrator.
