Consolidate Email Accounts With Google Mail Fetcher

• General
• Google

If you’ve read my other post on how to use Google Alerts to keep up to date on the latest happenings in your niche, you’ll know that Google offers other services then just search. In fact, you may even be using Google’s free email service Gmail. If you have multiple websites or blogs you most likely have just as many email addresses.

Instead of having to visit each and every single one of your inboxes and having to remember the login information, why not get all of your emails sent to your Gmail inbox instead! Using Mail Fetcher, you can grab the entire email or retrieve a copy of the email from up to 5 of your email accounts. While 5 email accounts isn’t a whole lot, this is still a great service and one that I definitely use myself.

Let’s get started shall we?

First things first, head on over to Gmail and sign in if you aren’t already. Once your inbox opens up, take a look at the top right hand side of the navigation bar located at the very top of the window. You will notice your Gmail address, Settings, Older Version, Help and Sign Out. To set up Mail Fetcher you are going to want to click on Settings.

As you can probably guess this will take you to the Settings section of Gmail. If you never knew that this existed go ahead and browse around, there are quite a few settings that you can customize that will make using Gmail a lot easier. Now that we are at the Settings screen you are going to want to click on the Accounts tab.

Make your way down to the 3rd section labeled Get mail from other accounts. This is where we are going to enter our information and setup the email retrieval. Before we go on, using Mail Fetcher requires that your email account supports POP3 access. If you are unsure whether or not it does, you will need to contact your service provider and check with them. I am currently using GoDaddy and their free email account that you receive when you sign up for hosting, so if you are in the same boat or know that you have POP3 access, follow along!

Under the Get mail from other accounts section there should be an Add another mail account link. It may be something a little bit different if you do not already have accounts setup. A window will popup that starts the process of adding the information needed by Mail Fetcher to retrieve the emails. Go ahead and enter the email address that you would like to fetch mail from and click Next Step.

This is where it may get confusing depending upon how much you know about email accounts or how well you can navigate around your service provider. Go ahead and enter your username and password that you would normally use to sign in with. Don’t worry, your information is safe and secure. If you are using GoDaddy’s free email account that they provide for you when you signup for web hosting, you can type in pop.secureserver.net as the POP Server and 110 as the Port.

Now we come across 4 options that Mail Fetcher provides us with. The first being whether or not you would like to leave a copy of the retrieved message in your actual inbox that you are retrieving the email from. If you want the message left there without being deleted, go ahead and make sure you check the check box. Note: Depending upon your service provider and the way that they have their email account setup, once Mail Fetcher retrieves an email the original message may be deleted! Google will do it’s best to notify the server to leave the original email there, but it is ultimately up to the server and not Google on whether or not the email gets deleted.

The next option is whether or not you would like to use an SSL connection when retrieving your emails. For those of you not aware, SSL adds an extra layer of security when connecting to a server and is almost always used when transmitting personal data or private information. Your server must provide an SSL connection otherwise Mail Fetcher will throw an error.

Option 3 lets you label the incoming email address with anything that you want. I usually just leave it as the default email address that I am retrieving the email from but you can name it whatever you want.

Last but not least is whether or not you would like to archive the retrieved email. What exactly is archiving you ask? Glad you asked because I was just about to tell you. Archiving your email with Gmail means that the email message will be sent directly to the All Mail folder and skip your inbox. If you have a busy inbox already and don’t want it flooded with more emails, this is a great way to keep things separated. Choosing to archive the email never deletes it, it just moves it to a different folder.

Go ahead and choose which options you would like and click Add Account. If everything went ok you should be viewing another page asking you whether or not you would like to be able to also send email from the address that you entered. This is a really great feature that I enjoy about Gmail and use it very frequently, I even use it with my blog. Instead of just being able to read the email in Gmail you can also reply to the email from the same address that it was sent to without ever actually having to sign into your original account. You can always change this option later if you don’t find it useful, so decide which option you would like and click Next Step to proceed.

The next page we encounter will let us choose a name we want to associate with the email address from which you are retrieving the emails. Enter whatever name suits you and once again click Next Step. As an extra measure of security Gmail needs you to verify that you actually own the email address. I guess you really can’t bypass this feature as Gmail does not provide a skip or end button so just click on Send Verification whether or not you actually plan to send anything.

An email will be sent to the inbox of the original email account with a verification code. You can either click the link in the email or enter the code into the provided input box. After entering the code click Verify and you should be all set! Mail Fetcher will now automatically check your email inbox for any new messages and forward them to your Gmail inbox or archive folder depending upon which settings you chose.

Pretty neat huh? Mail Fetcher seems to check your email inbox every hour for new email messages throughout the day. The only thing that I wish was better about this service is that you could provide more then 5 email addresses but I really can’t complain. If you really wanted to bypass this feature you could set up another Gmail account (considering they are free) and repeat the same process. Just make sure that you set it up so that you can retrieve the inbox of the new Gmail account.

I hope this article helped you in some way or that you learned something new from it. If you found it useful or too hard to follow, feel free to drop me a comment.

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