G-mail takes on the world
One e-mail to read them, one g-mail to rule to them all!
Remember the days when you had only one e-mail account? Many thought – and said so, too – that e-mail was a fad. You would never need more than one address. How many have you got now?
Web 2.0 is today’s buzzword. You can read more about it here. In any case, e-mail was not to be left in the dark. Google took the lead a few years ago when it announced its g-mail service, offering a whopping 2 Gigabytes of storage.
Hotmail and Yahoo couldn’t compete at the time. Now, Yahoo announced unlimited e-mail storage coming by mid-2007. Hotmail has yet to make a similar announcement, but you can expect one soon.
Interestingly, all of these free e-mail providers are moving from desktop e-mail clients like Thunderbird, Outlook and Eudora to web-based e-mail clients. Web browsers are now able to function as full e-mail clients. Portability and accessibility are the selling points. All this is fine and dandy, but still, some features of web-based e-mail clients are lacking.
Certainly, you do have features such as contact lists, address books, vacation auto responders and to-do lists, bit it’s all for naught when you have multiple e-mail accounts. You’ve got to access each of your e-mail accounts using that provider’s web-based e-mail client. Forwarding e-mail to another account is messy, cumbersome to activate and deactivate. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to access multiple e-mail accounts and reply to them from one location, or interface?
Well, guess what, now you can.
Normally, you had to forward your e-mail to another address and then reply to it from that account. The problem was that your reply-to address would change. For example, you log on to your Yahoo account, and have your e-mail from Hotmail forwarded to Yahoo. When you read the Hotmail-addressed e-mail, you can only reply to it using your Yahoo account. The recipient receives a reply from your Yahoo e-mail and often doesn’t know who you are. So, your e-mail ends up in their spam folder. It doesn’t look too professional, either, when you’re dealing with counterparts in business communications, using two very different accounts.
To combat this, g-mail has since recently allowed users to “Send Mail As.” What it means is that you can send Yahoo e-mail from g-mail and yet, the recipient will be getting a Yahoo-looking message. Put simply, you can use this to collect e-mail from all your 3rd party e-mail accounts, and retain all the functionality.
G-mail’s Send Mail As does not require forwarding to retrieve messages from other accounts. It still can do it if you desire, though. Rather, it uses your proper credentials. It uses your preconfigured e-mail account settings and acts as a pass-through to your 3rd party e-mail accounts.
To set this up, you must have a g-mail account. They are free, of course. In g-mail, on the top right, look for Settings, then Accounts. There are two options:
- Send Mail As – retrieve and reply to non g-mail e-mail, retaining the original e-mail address. Just as if you were accessing your other e-mail accounts directly.
- Get Mail From Other Accounts – read and reply to e-mails from non g-mail accounts, but recipients will see your g-mail address. Essentially, it’s the same thing as with forwarded e-mail.
To configure the Send Mail As options, you may need your original mail account server information. In most cases, g-mail recognizes popular mail servers. It’s quite intuitive and works like a charm.