How to manage almost any email account with Gmail.–PC Pitstop.
Using Gmail with Almost Any Email Account
By Leo Notenboom
Gmail is a great spam filter. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that as I write this, it is perhaps the best. Only a small amount of spam makes it through, and very few false positives are thrown. It’s not perfect, but no solution is.
What many people don’t realize is that you can use Gmail to handle email from almost any email address you have. I use Gmail almost exclusively these days to handle my @askleo.com email, my other business related emails, and my personal email as well. My wife does the same.
I’ll show you how to use Gmail for any email account supporting POP3 and SMTP access.
Definitions and assumptions
You need to start with a working email account at some provider that is not Google. The point of this exercise is to access your non-Google email using Google’s Gmail service. That existing account can be on a free provider, like Outlook.com or Yahoo!, it can be a paid account, or it can be an account configured on a domain you own.
You will need to know the POP3 settings to access the email in that account, and you will need to know the SMTP settings to send mail from that account. This is the same information you get from your provider to configure a desktop program such as Microsoft Office Outlook, Windows Live Mail, or Thunderbird.
I’ll use “somerandomservice.com” as an example of a domain that you have purchased and own. Purchasing a domain is perhaps the best way to get an email address that you can keep pretty much forever. (I happen to own “somerandomservice.com”, so I know I’m not abusing someone else’s domain for example purposes.) I’ll use [email protected] as an example of an email address already set up on that domain.
