If you’re like me, then you’ve got lots of different mail accounts. As nice as this may be to reduce spam and to always have the right address for any opportunity, as annoying it is when it comes to checking your mail “on the road”. It results in visiting several webmail sites which is really time consuming, especially if you check your mail regulary.
To solve this problem, I decided to use GMail as my one and only mail inbox. In this post, I show you how I set it up.
Previous setup
So far, I used Apple’s Mail.app with one account for every mail address I own. This was working fine as long as I went online with my Macbook Pro. But if I would like to check mail at work for example, I would have to visit 6 webmail sites for full processing of my mail inboxes. In practice, I just checked mail of my main account. Then I decided to read all my mail via just one webmail site, GMail.
Why GMail
Most of the setup I describe in this post can be used with any webmail, but I chose GMail for these reasons:
- Very good web interface
- IMAP support
- Use of various sender addresses
- 20MB as maximum attachment size
With these features present, an almost perfect setup is possible.
Import your mail to GMail
First of all, we need a way to import the mail of all other accounts into GMail. There are actually two ways
- GMail can fetch mail from POP3 servers
- Forward mails from all the other accounts to the GMail address
I first tried using POP3, but the result was not really satisfying, GMail decided to look for new mail only once a hour or even less. Sometimes I even had to trigger it manually. So I’m using the second method and forward any incoming mail to my GMail account.
Sending mail
When you send mail, you usually don’t want to use your GMail address as sender. If you reply to a mail, you want to use the address that the mail was addressed to. In GMail, you can use various sender addresses, not only your GMail address. The mail is still send via Google’s mail server, but the sender is different. This is not perfect, but acceptable if I have to send a mail via the web interface.
It would be much nicer if GMail would support a SMTP server per sender address and send the mail via this server. That’s exactly what mail clients would do.
Desktop integration
So far, all the mail we get shows up in our GMail inbox and we can send mail via Google’s mail server using any of our mail addresses. There is only one more thing to do, a proper desktop integration. The web interface is really nice and works great for anything it is supposed to, but there is no integration with your operating system. Using Mac OS X, you can for example send a photo via mail directly from iPhoto or attaching a file by dragging the file from the finder to the mail icon. That’s something I often use and don’t want to miss.
Luckily, GMail offers IMAP access. This means, you can read your mail with any Mail application, but the mail stays on the server. So when you log in the web inerface the next time, all your mail is still there and all changes made in your mail application are reflected as well. So just set up your GMail account in your favorite mail application and make sure to use IMAP, not POP3. Many mail applications support to specify IMAP folders for Trash, Drafts, Send mails etc. Make sure to map them properly to your GMail folders. For outgoing mail, use the SMTP servers of your various mail providers. That way, the mail is no longer send via Google, but via the proper server, which looks much more professional especially for business mails.
Conclusion
In this article, I showed you how to set up GMail as your one and only mail inbox. Even sending mail with proper sender address works. All these features can be used without loosing any comfort of a proper desktop integration by using a mail client and the IMAP server. The only improvement would be support for SMTP servers in GMail.
You’re using a similar setup and have suggestions for me? Or you need some more details of my setup? Just leave a comment.
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