Combine Your Email Accounts Into a Single Inbox

Juggling several email inboxes can be a hassle, but luckily with all the main email providers – Gmail, Outlook (Hotmail) and Yahoo – you can combine email accounts into one inbox, and send and receive email all from one place on the web. This will come in particularly handy to those of you who don’t like the idea of using a desktop client.

We’ve put together a guide for all the major email providers, making it easy for you to figure out how to get all of your emails into one inbox, and do away with the time-waster of checking several inboxes every morning. Get all of your email in one place using the guidelines below.

Gmail

With Gmail, getting all of your other email accounts into your Gmail inbox couldn’t be easier. The feature is built into Gmail’s native settings, by going to the Accounts tab, where the process hasn’t changed much.

• Under Accounts and Import click Check mail from other accounts. 
• A pop-up window will open up where you can enter your other email address – whether Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail or other POP3 accounts.
• Enter the password for that account when prompted, the POP server, and port. You also have certain customizable features to choose from including automatically archiving messages sent to that email address, as well as adding a label to them.

The next step is to ensure that you can send email from that account. You will be prompted to set that up after adding your account:

• Enter your name as you want it to be appear to recipients.
• Choose whether to send it through Gmail or through your email provider’s SMTP servers.
• Enter the verification code sent to your secondary email address.
• When composing a new menu, you should now have a drop-down menu in theFrom field where you can choose which address to use to send a message.

The final step, which is optional, is to enable Multiple Inboxes in Gmail labs. If you want to be able to a more organized view of your separate inboxes, enable the feature in Labs. Once it’s enabled, it can be configured under Settings.

• Click the Multiple Inboxes tab in the settings menu
• For the search query, type label: followed by your label exactly as it appears, but make sure you don’t leave a space between the colon and the label itself.
• You can further configure the settings – choose how many messages should appear, and where the panel should appear on your screen.

Outlook

With Outlook launching a web-based interface, and taking Hotmail’s place, you can now use the service to create a unified inbox. Sign in with your Microsoft Live account, or sign up for a new account if you don’t have one. These are the steps you have to follow to add other accounts to your Outlook.com inbox:

• Click on the gear icon to access More mail settings and under Managing your account click Sending/receiving email from other accounts.
• Click on Add an email account, and enter your email address and password.
• You can then decide where you want new emails from that address saved – either your inbox or a new folder.
• After going through these steps, you should receive a verification email at your secondary email address to allow you to send emails from your Outlook account.
• Like Gmail, you’ll be able to select your ‘sent from’ address using a drop down menu from the compose window.

Yahoo

If you prefer to use Yahoo Mail as your primary inbox, log in to your account, and do the following:

• In the menu at the top of the page, click Options and select Mail Options.
• Click Mail Accounts, and from there you can add other accounts.
• Hit the +Add button and you’ll be prompted to type in a name for the account and the email address.
• Gmail and Outlook make it a little easier by automatically generating your settings, but with Yahoo you’ll have to look up the POP settings for each of your accounts.
• After saving your settings, you should also receive a verification email sent to you secondary email account so you can send email from your Yahoo Inbox.
• Like Gmail and Outlook, you’ll be able to select your ‘sent from’ address using a drop down menu from the compose window.

Mail Forwarding

It’s also worth noting that if you don’t want to access your email accounts using POP you can always use the workaround of forwarding your emails to your primary inbox, provided you provide access to send email as that account. Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo all provide users with the email forwarding settings.

• In Gmail go to Settings, and select Forwarding and POP/IMAP. Under Forwardingclick Add a forwarding address. You can then just add the email address you want to use as your primary inbox and be sure to click the verification email that you receive.
• In Outlook, under Managing your account, click Email forwarding. You can then enter the email address you want to use as your primary inbox.
• With Yahoo, you can access mail forwarding if you upgrade to Yahoo Plus which will set you back $19.99 a year.

Do you have any tips or tricks on how to combine email accounts in one inbox? Let us know about them in the comments.

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