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.