Web Dev Notes

I have recently discovered a new website which has earned a spot in my Google Reader after providing several great articles! The website is z-oc.com by Guilherme who is a software developer who makes prototypes for Sony Ericsson mobiles. Recently he wrote an article regarding How to Manage all your Email Accounts with Gmail which I wanted to share here because it is certainly valuable information!

The process described by Guilherme requires three main steps:

1. Forward your current addresses to Gmail
2. Define an email management policy
3. Set-up Gmail to assume different identities

The full instructions for each step can be found here.

One thing to note is that this approach will allow you to easily manage all of your email accounts within a single Gmail account. It will not however prevent people from knowing you are using Gmail when you send a reply. What do I mean by this exactly?

Lets consider you email bob@cheese.com. Now imagine Bob set-up his bob@cheese.com account to forward to gmail. When bob replies to his email from within Gmail, some users (depending the email system they use) will see the reply being from bob@cheese.com whereas others will see the reply as being from bob@gmail.com on behalf of bob@cheese.com.

Is this bad? Depends! If you run multiple websites on multiple domains and have many different email addresses to check constantly, it could definitely save you TONS of time by having them all forward to one account where they can be managed! It’s also great if you have an old email address which you want to stop using, because when you reply to messages from old emails, you can set Gmail to reply from the new address replacing the old one.

If however you don’t want people to know you use Gmail, then don’t use this method. Why would it matter if people found out you were using Gmail? I personally don’t mind at all but perhaps you feel using Gmail makes you look less professional or perhaps you don’t want people to know your actual Gmail account name!

What method do you use for managing your email? Let us know and we’ll post a link to your article!