Consolidate Your Email

email_logoIf you are like most people you find that where one email account was enough, you now are managing several email accounts. Probably you started off with the email account provided by your internet service provider (ISP) and that was enough. Or you only had the email account provided to you by your workplace, and that was enough. Or at least it was until they decided to invoke that new rule, “Email is for official business only”. So now, to keep in touch with your Aunt Mabel and your old girlfriends or boyfriends, you were compelled to get a personal email account. It was important that this new email account be web-based so you could continue to use it from work to email Aunt Mabel and the others. You turn to one of the generic providers such as Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail in order to accomplish this end. The next thing you know, you are now carrying an Android Smart-phone, and to gain full functionality, you also need to get a Gmail account. How do you manage all of this? Read on!

The answer to all of this is to consolidate all your email accounts so they are collected into one in-box. This is actually simpler than it sounds. There are several players in the mix that will allow you to aggregate all of your email accounts into one email account, while still maintaining the ability to send and receive from any of your accounts individually. The two biggest players would be Gmail provided by Google and Outlook.com, provided by Microsoft. You will need to create an account with the provider of your choice to make this happen. The accounts are free, and are not really another email account you need to manage, unless you want to. Both Outlook and Gmail have subtle differences but both work in a similar fashion that allows you to have one email in-box for all your email, or if you wish to maintain a degree of separateness, then you can have multiple in boxes, but all in one location. The benefit of this is that your email accounts stay separate, but you only have one log-in to get to them all. In all fairness I should mention that most providers provide methods to aggregate email accounts but in my opinion Outlook and Gmail are the most feature rich. I personally use Outlook.Com as it seems to offer the best spam control.

Once you have selected your vendor for email consolidation, log in to your account and go to the account options. There you will find that you can import email accounts from other vendors and ISPs, such as Yahoo!, AOL, Time Warner, Fuse-net, Zoomtown, etc. You will need the same information you used to originally set up the individual accounts such as account type, account names, user names, and passwords. As you add each account you will have the option of receiving the email in a common in-box, or creating a separate in-box for each. After importing all email accounts, you now only need to log-in to get all your email at one time. Additionally, you will have all your email available on all your devices. You can also access using locally installed software such as Outlook or Windows Live Mail.

So that is it. Just as simple as that. Once you have set it up, you will feel as if you are back in the day when you only had one email account to concern yourself with, and you can once again start communicating with good old Aunt Mabel.

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Tom Lind

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1 Comment

  1. JOHN LINDOctober 15, 2014

    Very useful article!

    Reply

Feel free to comment, why should I have the last word.

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