How to fetch your other email accounts into your Gmail

It is true that GMail is one of the best web-hosted email systems around and have a huge disk space to boot! However, this great deal is nothing if it will not be used to its full potential. Being able to archive your mails for future reference and so as to keep your inbox clean is good enough, and so are the labels which makes sifting through hundreds of emails a little easier is good enough, so what else is missing? Forwarding your mails from one account to your Gmail account.

Having one email account to catch all of the non-spam messages from your various email addresses by forwarding them to your main account is not a revolutionary idea. However, being able for Gmail to fetch your messages from another server is a feature of Gmail not know to many. Here, we’ll see how easy it is to set up your GMail account and therefore further using Gmail to its full extent.

Fetching your mails from your other service provider to your Gmail account is easy, just follow these steps: (click on the images to view the full-sized image)

1. Go to Settings > Accounts, there you will see various options for your account such as adding another email address, upgrading your storage (the current is at 5G, who needs more, really?) and what we’re after: Get mail from other accounts. Just click on the “Add another mail account link.”

2. A popup window will appear that will be asking you for your email address, (e.g. user@yourserver.com). Just type it in and click on the Next Step button.

3. The next window will ask for details for your new email account such as your password, POP server, and port. It will also ask you what you want to do with the messages that will be downloaded from that account, as always, you have 4 choices:

   

   1. Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server. Usually, when a message is downloaded from an account to a mail fetcher, the message will be archived (or deleted).
   2. Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail.
   3. Label incoming messages: [email address]. That is the default, but you may change it to whatever you like. As for me, I did not checked it off, rather I created several filters so the messages will be filed accordingly.
   4. Archive incoming messages (Skip the inbox)
      

And that’s all there is to it! Easy, isn’t it? You have to wait for a couple of minutes for the messages to be retrieved, after that, Gmail will automagically download your messages whenever a new message arrives for you.