I have several e-mail addresses: my personal fred-hart.co.uk, my personal Corinium Radio, my college account as well as all the generic Corinium Radio e-mail addresses.
At home, I use Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to send and recieve my personal e-mails, and Mozilla Thunderbird to send and recieve the generic Corinium Radio e-mails.
However, there are times when I need to access my e-mails remotely – for example, from within college. Or, when I’m in the Corinium Radio studio I seem to spend a lot of time logging in and out of all the various accounts.
That is why in early December I set up a Google Mail account, which can be accessed just about anywhere at any time. I have configured it to be able to send and recieve e-mails using my existing accounts without effecting what e-mails get sent to Outlook and Thunderbird (so I can still use those at home). This is the biggest advantage to me choosing Google Mail over any other webmail based e-mail account.
And, setting it up is very easy to do so – I have created this easy guide. If you haven’t got a Google Mail account, its completely free and easy (less than a few minutes) to set up. In my opinion, its one of the better (if not the best) webmail based free account service.
Send Mail from Another Account
You will need access to the e-mail account in order to set this up, but it doesn’t need to be POP3 access – this means it works with my college e-mail address, as well as e-mail forwarders with no direct login.
- Log in to your Google Mail account.
- Click on ‘Settings’ (at the top right of the page), and then ‘Accounts and Import’.
- Click on ‘Send mail from another address’. A new window will open…
- In the ‘Name’ box, type the display name. This will be the text that appears in the ‘from’ field when you send e-mails using the account.
- In the ‘E-mail address’ box, type the e-mail address of the account you want to be able to send from. Not your Google Mail address, unless you have a second Google Mail address!
- Click on ‘Next Step’.
- You then have the option of either sending through Google Mail servers, or through the existing e-mail account’s SMTP servers. I suggest you send through Google Mail’s servers – if your account is an e-mail forwarder then you won’t be able to send through SMTP servers. If you’re not sure, check with the provider of the service.
- Click on ‘Next Step’.
- You will then be asked to verify your e-mail address – here, you will need access to your existing (non-Google Mail) e-mail address. Google Mail send a verification e-mail to this account.
- Once you have recieved the e-mail, click on the confirmation link in the e-mail.
You can now send e-mails via Google Mail from another account. Your e-mails will appear as from <Your Google Mail address> on behalf of <Your Display Name> (<Your existing e-mail address>) (eg. ???@googlemail.com on behalf of Fred Hart (admin@fred-hart.co.uk)).
Recieving E-mails
You can also add a POP3 account – but it does have to be a POP3 account so e-mail forwarders won’t work here. You can add up to 5 accounts here.
- Again, go to ‘Settings’ and ‘Accounts and Import’ once logged in to your account.
- Click on ‘Add POP3 account’
- In the new window, type the e-mail address, then click ‘Next Step’.
- In the next box, enter the username. The box will probably be filled in already, with whatever comes before the ‘@’ but with most accounts it won’t work unless you add the @domain.co.uk on the end.
- Enter the password for your e-mail address. This isn’t necessarily your Google Mail password (unless you’ve set it the same).
- The POP server is likely to be mail.domain.co.uk (but may be slightly different) – Google Mail is good at detecting this automatically so unless the box is blank here, leave it.
- There are then several tick boxes. Ignore the bottom 3 for now (unless you know what they mean). But you might want to tick ‘Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server’ if you plan to use Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook in order to recieve your e-mails as well.
If you have any more queries, I’d be happy to help and can provide more details on how to set it up if you wish. E-mail me on admin@fred-hart.co.uk or use the comments form (below).
February 1st tomorrow – so website stats will be released 🙂
