Corral Multiple Email Addresses Into One Email Client
Do you have two or more email addresses? Tired of flipping between web pages to check them all? Why bother. Instead, set them all up in one email client.
Here’s what this looks like on my computer.
When I click “Inbox” I can see all inbox messages from the six accounts listed here. To focus on the contents of just one inbox, I click the name of that inbox.
Given how much time people still spend on email, this tactic ought to help save time. Also, I can file all my email in my own folders, offline, by having them come into a mail client.
The screen shot above shows how this looks in Mac Mail.app, but most email software lets you do this. I have this set up on my Mac, iPad and iPod Touch. (I don’t do this on my phone – long story – but I likely will when I eventually spring for an iPhone.) I could also create this setup in Microsoft Outlook and other email software.
There are other ways of doing this. For instance, you can have all email accounts but one forward messages to the one you want to use. The only shortcoming is that you would need to sign in to another address to reply from that address, if the original email wasn’t sent to your “main” address. (Switching addresses in software like Mac Mail is as easy as choosing the “from” address from a drop list.)
That said, email forwarding is a great way of keeping messages coming from addresses you eventually want to get rid of. Soon enough, the only messages going to that address will be spam.
Do you use multiple email addresses? How do you keep track of correspondence in each of them? Let us know in the comments below.
—Luigi Benetton (@LuigiBenetton)
[This tip originally appeared on luigibenetton.com]
Google has recently made changes to make having multiple email addresses (work, personal, association, etc) easier to manage.
If I log into a website using a gmail name like “davecb-football”, and then follow a link to a Google page, I will access that page as davecb-football@gmail.com, not as davecb-GTALUG@gmail.com, one of my associational addresses. (GTALUG is the GTA Linux User Group)
This allows me to have specific-purpose email addresses, which I connect to a common mail reader, just as you suggest.