How to Check Your Other Email from Gmail

Since more people are checking their email from multiple devices, they tend to use webmail rather than an email client software to check their email. That is why Gmail is so popular, and becoming more so as Gmail app are available on smartphones.

Besides an Gmail account, you may have other corporate email account. Or you may have a domain email that is associated with your website domain name which you obtained from your webhost.

Perhaps you prefer the web interface of Gmail over the webmail that your webhost provides. Certainly Gmail is more user-friendly than other web-based email programs such as Horde, RoundCube, or SquirrelMail -- even with the small amount of ads that are in Gmail.

Well, it is possible to set up your Gmail account to access your other emails from within the Gmail interface. This article will show you how.

For the purpose of this example, suppose that you have an email address youremail@example.com that you would like to access via Gmail.

First you need to have a Gmail account to begin with. Just go to Gmail.com and sign up for a free one.

1. Sign into your Gmail account and go to your Gmail settings as shown on the right.

2. Click on the Accounts and Import tab.

3. In the section "Check mail from other accounts", click link "Add a POP3 mail account you own" as shown below. Your other email account must support POP (Post-Office-Protocol) access, which most do.

4. Enter the other email address that you want to access ...

5. Now you need to enter access information to your other mail server such as the following...

At this point, it is best to call your webhost to find out what these settings should be. They will be different for each webhost and may even be different for each email account within the same webhost. This is the reason why it is good idea to get a webhost that provides good phone support.

Typically the username is same as the email address.

Gmail needs to know your email password so that it can access your other email.

The "POP Server" refers to the "Incoming Email Server" of your webhost. This is the server in which Gmail will go to fetch your emails. Your webhost administrator should be able to tell you this information as well as the port for that server.

These values will be different if you choose to checkmark "Always use a secure connection" as I have done in the above screen shot. A secure connection means transmission with encryption over a "SSL" (secure socket layer).

Since my webhost support SSL, I prefer to use it for greater security.

One of the settings let you specify if you want to leave messages on the other server or not. I typically will not leave a copy of retrieved message, since I am now pulling messages into Gmail. Note that if you do not leave message on the other server, your email will only be accessible by Gmail. If you go into your webhost webmail to check your other email, there will be none because Gmail has fetched them to Gmail's server.

Typically you should not checkmark "Archive incoming messages". Afterall, you want to see these retrieve messages in your Gmail inbox.

These email server settings can sometime be determined from your webhost control panel. If they are using cPanel for example, you can go into "Email Accounts" and select "Configure Email Client". This may show you some of the settings that you need.

You can see your added account in the "Accounts and Import" tab of Gmail settings...

It will also show when the last time Gmail went and retrieved your other emails. You can not control the frequency at with Gmail fetches. But if you ever needed to, you can force Gmail to fetch your domain email immediately by clicking on the "Check mail now" link (see above)

As shown in the above screen shot, you can set it up so that when replying to a message, it replies from the same address the message was sent to. This is preferred.

You can even use Gmail to compose and send from your newly added email account. When composing a new mail in Gmail, you can specify which email account to send the mail out from.

If you changed your other email password or if your webhost changes settings, there is a link to edit the information that you had specified.

In the event that you no longer want Gmail to fetch your other email, you can remove it from Gmail with the "delete" link shown above.

A nice feature is that Gmail will scan for viruses in your email attachments before fetching the other email into Gmail. If virus is detected, it will leave the mail on your other email server and will not pull it into Gmail. However, it will notify you that an email was not retrieved. It notifies you by sending you an email notification to your Gmail email account.

Google has some supporting documentation on using Gmail with other email accounts here.