Consolidate all your email accounts in Gmail

Or what I would have titled as “One Gmail to rule them all!”

Anyway, this tutorial was meant for someone who asked about it but I thought I’d post it here as well for future reference.

This simple tutorial will enable you to use your GMail account as your catch-all inbox for all your other email accounts. The idea is simple — be able to receive all messages form all other email accounts into your GMail and then send emails or reply to emails from the originating recipient.

Here’s how you do it. (Note: This tutorial assumes that you other email accounts are on cPanel or have a Forwarding Option)

Setting Up Email Forwarding

This step will show you how to setup the forwarding option for your other email accounts. It assumes you’re running on cPanel/WebMail. If you have a different platform, it should still be almost similar to this.

1.) Login to your WebMail. You will directed to a landing page just like below. Look for the “Forwarding Options” link.

2.) You will then be prompted with a form asking for the address you want to forward your emails. Type in your GMail account. Click Add Forwarder.

3.) You will get a message that the Forwarding has been successfully completed. We’re done with this stage.

OK, let’s move on. Login to your GMail account.

Setting Up Email Accounts in GMail

The following steps will show you how to activate email accounts in Gmail. We’re assuming you already have GMail; if not, get one here.

4.) Inside GMail, go to Settings -> Accounts -> click on “Add another email address”. See screenshot below:

5.) A pop-up window will appear, asking you what email address you want to add. Type-in the desired account name and email address you used above (in step 1). Click Next.

6.) A new page will ask you to Cancel, Go Back to the previous page or Send Verification. Click on Send Verification.

7.) The verification email will be sent to your other email account. Since, it was set to forward all messages to your Gmail, just go back and check your Gmail Inbox for it. Follow instructions by clicking on the link provided. You’re all set and ready to go.

8.) To send email with the new account, just click on Compose and on the composer panel’s “From:” field, you’ll see a drop down allowing you to select which account you are using to send.

9.) By default, all outgoing mails will be sent/replied-to by your Gmail account as the Sender. You can change this so that the originating recipient is the one replying to the email. Change this in the Settings -> Accounts page as shown below:

Take note that your signature will always appear at the footer of all composed emails no matter which email accounts your use. The Inbox of the forwarding emails will still have a copy of the messages but you may want to check in and empty them once in a while to save inbox space.

Likewise, you won’t get any forwarded emails if the other email accounts are down, though you can still send emails thru GMail.

Disclaimer: I do not guarantee that this method will work on all types of email accounts.

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

17 Comments

Health Buff says:

14 years ago

Thanks! I’ve done it and it works great! You could actually do this for your other gmail accounts to make 1 super gmail account :D
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Seshaya says:

14 years ago

gr8 resrch bro…
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Xandrouz says:

15 years ago

nice. ok to ah. anyways, bro yuga, may ma susugest ka bang maganda pero murang hosting? kasi currently sa philhosting.net ako, maeexpired na sa January yung hosting plan ko.
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maala says:

15 years ago

hey ,,, meni je neko usao na msn ii izgleda promijenioo lozinku jer ja nikako nemogu uci…. kako da ja sam provali sebi na msn ii da postavii novu… pomiziiteee mi kako na povratim svoj msn
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[email protected] says:

15 years ago

Hi Abe! I met you at Anton’s Maven Secrets Seminar. I have just got to say – I love this tip and will do it right now na. Haha. Hope we can do business together – and soon. You are such an inspiration. More power!
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karla says:

16 years ago

ovako ako neko zna ja viÅ¡e nemam korisniÄki raÄun jer sam zaboravila lozinku napravila bi opet e-mail adresu ali kako?????????ako neko zna neka napiÅ¡e i neka stavi za karlu!!!!!please:))))):):):):):):)=
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David B says:

16 years ago

as the first comment points out, this feature of Gmail does not work as you might expect. your real Gmail address is still visible in the headers, and more often than not, it’s also visible to the non-savvy email recipient who doesn’t even know what headers are.
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yvainne says:

17 years ago

i consolidated my emails to gmail, but I want gmail to be accessed in my Outlook 2003. I cannot receive and access messages from my other emails (which were auto-forwarded to gmail) when using outlook. How can I receive the auto-forwarded messages in my Outlook?
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What is Gmail? says:

18 years ago

Why is this a reason to switch from Yahoo, as cheeseter says? Yahoo also collects messages from other POP3 accounts. At least, it did back in ’04 or so when I last needed that feature. BTW, the new Yahoo2 beta mail interface is terrible. It’s like they tried to make an AJAX version of Thunderbird.
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Trenton Djerzi says:

18 years ago

And then why not get all of the e-mail automatically scanned for content, and linked – Use the RSS functionality in MailSpaces.com to pull in GMail, and have its natural language technology “read” the content, and then link it all together?
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keso says:

18 years ago

great tutorial! I have done it myself…
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Aaron says:

18 years ago

I also have Google for Domains. I can create up to 500 users with my account plan.

Nwei, I have just tried your tutorial and it worked flawlessly.
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Abe Olandres says:

18 years ago

@ audienceone

In theory, yes. It might not work if your other email does not have any forwarding options.

@ noemi and kid

Two of the best features I reall liked with Gmail.

@ markrenn

I got Google for Domains but the total number of email accounts are limited.
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markrenn says:

18 years ago

has anyone here tried using http://www.google.com/hosted/ ?

Bring Gmail to your domain.
This special beta test lets you give Gmail, Google’s webmail service, to every user at your domain. Gmail for your domain is hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.

I’ve been using it for almost 3 weeks and i can really say that it is a great
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kid says:

18 years ago

it’s also a nice catch all inbox because it catches spam quite well.
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Noemi Dado says:

18 years ago

I use my gmail as a catch all inbox because of gmail’s search feature.
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audienceone says:

18 years ago

It’ll work as long as you’re able to verify/authenticate that the email is yours or that you are allowing gmail to send mails using the other account.

The original headers though will still show that the original message came from gmail. It works just like php’s mail function.
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