After we showed you how useful Gmail can be, you can check all your email accounts (Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, etc.) in Gmail. Luckily, Gmail can act as an email client and allows you to receive email from other email accounts as long as they support POP access.
The Gmail Mail Fetcher feature downloads all your old emails from other email accounts as well as new emails and displays them along with your Gmail messages in your inbox. You can add up to five other email accounts.
We are also going to explain how you can use Gmail offline, because it is possible that at some point you can go somewhere without the Internet. Of course, you can use a third-party email client like Apple Mail, Outlook, or Thunderbird, but if you’d rather use a web browser, there’s a standalone app for Google Chrome.
Set up an email collector to receive email from other accounts
To set up Mail Fetcher to check email from another account, click the Settings button and select Settings from the drop-down menu. Click the Accounts link at the top of the Settings screen.
In the «Checking mail from other accounts (using POP3)» section, click the «Add your own POP3 account that you own» link.
The Add Your Mail Account dialog box will open. Enter the email address you want to receive email messages for in your Gmail account in the «Email address» input field. Click Next Step.
Enter the settings for the other email account, such as Username, Password, POP Server, and Port.
If you still want to be able to check email for another account in other email clients on other computers, check the «Leave a copy of the received message on the server» box.
You can also tag incoming messages for another account with a custom label so you can tell which messages are in your Gmail inbox. To do this, check the «Mark incoming messages» box and select a label from the drop-down list. The list has an option to create a new label if you don’t have a suitable one.
If you don’t want messages from another account to end up in your inbox along with your Gmail messages, you can check the «Archive incoming messages (Skip Inbox)» box to bypass your inbox and archive messages immediately.
NOTE. You can also set up a filter to move messages to a label. See Lesson 4 for more information.
Click Add Account.
You now have the option to set up Gmail to send mail as a different email address. To do this, select «Yes, I want to be able to send mail as» and click «Next step».
Enter information about your other email address. By default, the «Treat as alias» checkbox is checked, but you can turn it off.
When you use an alias, messages you send to the Send Mail As address show up as unread in your inbox and also appear in your Sent Mail. Also, when you receive an email from a «Send Mail As» address and you click «Reply» on the message, the «To» field is populated with your primary Gmail address. To avoid these issues, uncheck «Treat as an alias» and then click «Next Step».
If you are going to send email as your other address, you must tell Gmail whether you want to use Gmail servers or SMTP servers for your other provider. Setting up «Send Mail As» is easier with Gmail servers, so we recommend that you do so. Select «Send via Gmail» and click «Next Step».
Now you need to make sure you are the owner of the other email address you are adding to Gmail. Click «Send Confirmation» to have Gmail send the email to a different address.
The confirmation email contains a link that you can use to verify your address, or you can enter the verification code from the email address in the Enter and Verify Verification Code input field and click Verify.
The Add Another Your Email Address dialog will close automatically. If you click on a link in the confirmation email, you may have to close the dialog box manually by clicking the «Close Window» link.
Your other email address is added to the «Check mail from other accounts (using POP3)» section of the «Settings» screen. It is also added to the «Send mail as» section if you choose to send mail from this address in Gmail. In the «Send email as» section, under «When replying to a message», you can choose to «Reply from the same address it was sent to» or «Always reply from the default address», which is your current Gmail account. Please note that you can always change the «From» address when creating a new message or reply.
Email messages received for another email account appear in your Inbox (unless you’ve automatically archived them or moved them to a label) with the label you’ve given them.
Hide folders and labels in Gmail IMAP
Easily access all of your Gmail in virtually any email program and on virtually any device. However, if you have a lot of email, you may not want to sync with everything, such as the All Mail folder, which contains five gigabytes of email.
If you only want to access messages in your Gmail inbox and your email program doesn’t allow you to unsubscribe from IMAP folders, you can hide folders or labels instead. This stops the download of mail in those labels.
Microsoft Outlook is an example of a program where you can download your Gmail mail using the IMAP protocol. Previously, we showed how to add gmail account to outlook using IMAP .
To hide the Gmail shortcut from IMAP access, click the Settings button and select Settings from the drop-down menu.
For any «System Labels» and custom «Labels» that you don’t want to sync with in your email program, uncheck the box next to the «Show in IMAP» option.
The next time you open your mail program or check your Gmail account in the program (sync with your account), the labels you have hidden will not be visible.
Make Gmail sync using IMAP faster with less email traffic
You can also speed up checking your email in another email program using IMAP by limiting the number of messages visible in each label (folder) in Gmail IMAP so that your email program has fewer options for downloading, caching and syncing.
To limit the number of messages visible in each folder in Gmail IMAP, click the gear settings button and select «Settings» from the drop-down menu. Click on the Forwarding and POP/IMAP link at the top of the Settings screen.
Scroll down to the «IMAP Access» section and select «Restrict IMAP folders to contain no more than this number of messages.» Select a number from the dropdown list and click Save Changes.
Send messages from another email account in Gmail
When sending a new email message or replying to an email message, you can change the email address from which you want to send the message. Select an address from the «From» dropdown list.
Disable mail picker for an email account
If you decide you no longer want to receive mail from another Gmail email account, you can turn off receiving mail for that account. To do this, click the «Settings» button and select «Settings» from the drop-down menu. Click the Accounts link at the top of the Settings screen. On the right side of the screen, in the «Check mail from other accounts (using POP3)» section, click the «Delete» link.
You can also edit the information for the secondary email address using the «edit information» link.
NOTE. The Mail Collector will stop receiving new messages from the other email account, but any previously received emails will remain in Gmail until you delete them.
A confirmation dialog will open to confirm that you want to delete the email account, then click OK.
A message will appear stating that the email account has been deleted. However, the email account remains in the «Send mail as» section if you choose to send email from that account. You can leave it there if you still want to use Gmail to send mail from this address, even if you won’t receive mail from this account. If you no longer want to send email from this account, click the «delete» link to the right of this email account in the «Send mail as» section.
Again a confirmation dialog opens to confirm that you want to remove this email account from «Send mail as».
