Forwarding Emails To Your Gmail Account

While we are on the topic of managing our many email accounts which must be maintained because we need them in doing our daily personal and business functions, I would like to discuss how having an email account with Google (called Gmail) can help ease your burden in checking your inboxes and replying to some messages in them. I personally feel that a shared inbox makes it much more convenient to organize emails, but today, I’d like to shine some light on Gmail. Some of us may wonder how a small company with online presence could hire so many personnel to handle queries to their sales, marketing, after-sales service, warehousing and other departments. Actually, we may not be aware that those many email addresses are being handled by only one (1) person and forwarding them to a Gmail account is the way to do it.

I am using both Yahoo! and Google’s free email services but I prefer the latter when it comes to handling my forwarded email accounts. Gmail has features that Yahoo! does not have especially in handling forwarded emails. Such features are important in maintaining the integrity of business emails especially the ones with yourname@yourcompany.com address. I shall explain below the details of how you can manage your company emails in Gmail without having an email server of your own.

Aside from the extra expense that you will incur in having an email server for your business emails, the countless spams or unsolicited messages that will try to get into your inboxes make it impractical anymore to have or subscribe to such service. Many web administrators would now advise just to have email forwarding service for your registered domain name and have your email addresses forwarded to a free account which I suggest to be that of Gmail for the following reasons:

1. POP (Post Office Protocol) Version 3 or POP3 Feature – This is an email account feature that lets you retrieve your messages (using POP email client program like Outlook Express or Mozilla Thunderbird) from the web and have them stored in your hard disk for your use in an offline status as contrasted to typical webmail accounts where you must be online to be able to read them. Gmail has this as a standard free option while you can have the feature in Yahoo! mail for a fee.
2. “Send Mail As” Feature – This is another free option that you can set in your Gmail account which is not available in free Yahoo! mail. This is a very useful feature when you reply to emails sent to your different accounts. By going to Settings, you can create “Send mail as” addresses to be able to send mail apart from the actual Gmail to which your other addresses are forwarded. Make sure to choose “Reply from the same address the message was sent to” in your settings.

There you have how you can handle your email communications using your many addresses without the hassle of opening your accounts one-by-one and replying the usual way. If you have other ways of handling multiple email accounts, please share them with us.