Get lots of customers asking me about multiple accounts and what all the fuss about gmail is... wrote this up to do as a mail shot... thought i'd post it on here for you lot... its aimed at non technical minded people... who at least know what pop is doing for them at the moment. Multiple email accounts, using Gmail to replace your email client, lower your hosting bill Advantages of using gmail over outlook free, reliable, managed email hosting 6GB of free storage > outlook runs into problems when handling large (over 2GB) PST files (PST is your mail store) Fantastic search feature makes it easy to find mail Access your emails, contacts and calendar from any computer with an Internet connection Fantastic spam filtering and virus checking Advantages outlook has over gmail Read receipt feature Runs locally on your PC so does not require an Internet connection to read your mail (but does to send and receive) Gmail and Multiple email accounts Gmail Can be set to collect email from external accounts. For example i have my gmail set to collect email from michaelexample@gmail.com, Michael@examplecomputing.co.uk and michael@examplecabling.co.uk I can also send via any of those accounts via gmail, although when replying or composing a new mail, the gmail account is always selected by default and i have to manually change it to my desired account Another bug i have found in gmail is the timed collection from your other accounts. I emailed the google team in regard to this problem and they did come back with an answer. They said that it will perform more regular collection according to how many mails were last downloaded - so if it performs a pop collection and no new mail was waiting then it will take longer before it performs its next collection. I tend to find that first thing in the morning my gmail has not performed a collection for at least 50 minutes, i will force a collection, then after that the longest period seems to be around 25 minutes - the more mail downloaded it will seem to do it every 6 to 10 minutes. While this send and receive can be annoying, once you are in the habit of clicking in the right place its no more of a hardship than say clicking on send and receive in outlook. Gmail is better at displaying images which have been attached to an email - rather than the user having to manually click on each image to open it, the images are displayed in the body of the message. IMAP and POP Collection from Gmail For me, the main reason i moved to using gmail instead of outlook was that i use multiple computers. I have a PC at work, a MacBook Pro, a Windows Laptop, a PC at home and i use other people's computers and also clients computers. I seemed to have my email downloaded in 3 or 4 different places, tis meant i ended up with duplicate emails, couldnt get my email on certain computers and also had problems with address books not having all my contacts. For me, condensing everything into gmail gave me one place to keep everything - from which i could access from anywhere. Now sometimes i still user outlook, but rather than collecting my mail and downloading it, i use IMAP to view my gmail box in real time. IMAP simply lets you view your mail, send and receive. So why has everyone not been using IMAP for all their accounts? Well google generously give us 6GB of storage with gmail... but not everyone is so generous, my other email providers only give me 50Mb... this is not nearly enough to keep everything in - which is why pop (downloading my emails) was a much better option - but now i have gmail collect them, then i imap to gmail to view everything! If you REALLY want to use outlook, or use outlook to back up your email you can turn pop access on inside gmail to that you can download our email from gmail, into outlook... When i say back up your email, you can set gmail to act as if it has never been downloaded... that way gmail can be your master and outlook can be the copy, or vice versa. The cheapest email hosting around With gmail being free, you can use it to cut the cost of your current hosting. Most hosting companies offer different levels of hosting. I know the company i use offer FREE email forwarding, or 20 for the cheapest hosting plan for a year. Now 20 is not a lot of money, i know there is cheaper around but i would never stray from my host as their service is perfect, but lets just say im opening a new domain for testing purposes, or a side project and i need to keep costs as low as possible... i don't but the hosting, i just get the forwarding and forward it directly to a gmail account. Even if you make a second gmail account specifically for this forwarding and then you get your mail account to collect pop from that gmail account... Gmail instead of outlook archive / Gmail for off-site file storage Another great thing you can do with gmail is use it as an archive. Lets say you dont want to do any of the above, you like your pop account, you love outlook and you want to stay how you are... but your running out of hard disk space... or you want some off site storage for back up - Gmail can help. It is well documented and I have found that PST (this is where outlook stores your email) files can become very unstable when they get large. To avoid them getting to large you can archive your email into another PST... when that gets large you can create another and another and another...etc Rather than making lots of archive folders, you can create a gmail account and make it a secondary account within outlook using IMAP... from there you can just use the inbox as a huge 6GB archive area. As for file storage - there is a small bit of free software called 'gmail drive' (or gdisk for mac), it simple makes a new drive under 'my computer' for windows users or mounts a new drive on the desktop for mac and linux users and allows you to use the 6GB as storage for what ever you like! Use your 6GB gmail drive with something like synctoy or syncback (i prefer syncback) and you have a great free 6GB back up solution. Links and other info (POP / IMAP), Import and Export contacts Gmail from Google http://mail.google.com gDisk (gmail drive for mac) http://gdisk.sourceforge.net/ Gmail Drive for Windows (all versions) http://www.filehippo.com/download_gmail_drive/tech/ Syncback free backup tool http://www.filehippo.com/download_syncback/ All Pop and IMAP settings are easily available once you are inside the gmail account settings, there are great guides on how to configure this with outlook. How to import your outlook contacts into Gmail open outlook click on file, import and export select export to a file select comma separated values (windows) select your address book and export open gmail open contacts select import located your new CSV file import a log is created on the gmail page to give you more detailed info Bit of an update, now google apps is free (google.com/a) you can use your own domain. if you are using exchange server you can still use google apps, just use the pop3 connector combined with something called sTunnel, stunnel will allow the pop3 connector to use SSL which the std pop3 connector wont allow. google apps will give you 50 free users... well worth it as it costs nothing!
My dad has been using gmail for a while now after I converted him. He loves it. My mum however won't use it. She prefers to use AOL / Talktalk client.
I have gmail but still not accustomed to the layout. Is there anyway to switch the view/layout to something similar to thunderbird/outlook? How do you download the emails but without removing them from the web version? Can you prevent google from accessing your searches when logged in??
I have been using Gmail now for Years! I got an invite of one of the testing team when it was still a non public service. Its great ,youll never run out of space and is reliable combined with the new Gmail app for windows mobile and Iphone it also is really easy to pick emails up on the phone now. Would recommend it to anyone
Any idea on how to 'phase out' my hotmail account? I've signed up for various forums, accounts etc. and don't want to have to inform everyone... Also, how do you create 'folders' in gmail?
You could just swap the registered email address in the forum settings ! Otherwise you can forward all mail from your hotmail to Gmail but that wouldnt actually phase it out as you would still need the Hotmail active
When you compose an email to a new contact in hotmail it gives you the option of saving the contact. Can you do this in gmail?
I have one of these htc google phones and I still havent set up gmail, my brother thinks im mad but i really am a technophobe.
