Regardless of any frustration I’ve encountered with Google and their products — (example: their irritating switch to using your Google+ identity whenever you review an app from Google play. I’m really not out to troll reviews, but when I do feel moved to actually write one, I prefer a level of anonymity. There be crazy people out there!) — there’s more love in this relationship than not. I say that for several reasons, one of them being the usefulness of gmail.
If you’re like me, maybe you have a variety of email accounts: one dedicated for spam — you know, the one you give out to people and organizations you actually never want to hear from again, your personal email, and your business email. And if you’re like me, you really don’t want to deal with logging into three separate applications to manage them.
Behold a layer of awesome: you can centralize all those accounts in gmail, and set it up in a way that you can reply FROM those addresses. So if you’re responding through gmail to a message that came through your business account, you can reply FROM your business account so you’re not advertising your personal account to people who are better off not having it (or maybe you’re the one better off for that, but I digress.)
This awesomeness is found under the little gear icon, and clicking on settings. One of the tabs that comes up at the top is called Accounts and Import, and a little ways down is a section called SEND MAIL AS. Click on “Add an email address you own”, and follow the prompts.
This is where I note: you’ll have to have some kind of clue about email setup, at the very least know where to find the mail server information for the account you’re setting up. For me personally, I have an email account included with my hosting, so I would find the information for that account under my hosting cpanel.
Here’s the kicker: at the bottom of the SEND MAIL AS section in your gmail settings, make sure you tick off “Reply from the same address the message was sent to”. Finally, don’t forget to set up either mail forwarding in your alternate email settings, or mail fetcher (read more about that here) in gmail so any messages sent to your alternate account get delivered to your gmail. And voila. Everything in one place. (A note about “treat as alias”, I personally leave that unchecked, because I like to keep these identities separate. I don’t really need gmail telling me that my other addresses are really me. I can make that connection on my own. You can read a little more about that behavior here.)
Your emails will still be delivered to the original email application your account is with (for example; the emails sent to my domain name address still show up in my inbox there if I log in to my webmail). Essentially, Gmail functions as a gateway to those messages.
And I think that’s amazing.