How to manage any external email account from Gmail

With the proliferation of email services these days, it can be rather annoying to have to check each one separately every day. To help with this—for those whose center of emailing activity is Gmail—there is a way to redirect the traffic from your external email accounts (Hotmail, Yahoo, private domains, etc.) to your Gmail inbox. Here we explain how.

The first thing to be clarified here is that your own-domain email address will not work as another Gmail account, but rather will be linked to a Gmail address of your choice—whether personal or professional—so that you can receive, read, write, and delete messages from your Gmail inbox. With that in mind, redirecting your email is actually a very simple task.

• In your Gmail inbox you need to access the settings and go to the Settings > Accounts tab. Once there, you’ll see that the fourth tab lets you configure your email accounts from other domains via POP3; you just have to click on “Import from Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL, or other webmail or POP3 accounts” and input your email address in the pop-up window.

• After clicking on “Next,” you’ll need to fill out the personal information for that account—username and password—and the POP Servers section. This info is different for every email server. For example, Microsoft’s email services (Outlook, Hotmail…) use this configuration.
• In addition, with the options that appear below your information, you can customize your external account in Gmail to save a copy of messages in the server inbox of the external site or to tag messages arriving from that address. In this case, since we’ve associated an official email address with a personal account, we’ve created a marker with a name to identify these messages.

• An important thing to keep in mind is the option to “Leave a copy of read messages on the server.” If you tick this, emails will remain intact and unread in the original inbox; if you don’t, they’ll be deleted and will only stay in your Gmail inbox.
• Once this process is complete, you’ll receive a message with a code that you should register to validate your Gmail account and add the new account. Now, all emails arriving to your other inbox will appear in your Gmail inbox with the corresponding category tag, if you’ve set one.

• Also remember that, unless you specify otherwise, the main email account will still be the Gmail one by default, even though you’re administering several simultaneously from the same inbox, meaning when you write a new message you’ll need to drop down the tab and select a different address if you want send the message with that domain.

The automatic redirection of your email to Gmail will make it much more straightforward to check your various inboxes since you can also be notified when a new message arrives through your smartphone notifications or using a Google Chrome browser extension.