As I posted previously (1, 2) Gmail can be a powerful tool for doing everything involved with managing your email. One huge thing that I’ve not addressed is setting up your email to pull in messages from other email accounts – including your work accounts. Today we’ll walk through how to do that.

First, make sure you’ve read/watched the previous posts regarding Gmail:

• The Advantages of Gmail
• Getting Started with Gmail

After you’ve gotten trough the basics of gettings started with it, let’s get you going on importing your other accounts. Because, despite the advantages that Gmail has, your workplace/ministry/school will not probably forward all of your mail to your Gmail account from now on – and the reality is that they will expect you to be reading those emails as well.

First, obviously, sign into Gmail.

At this point you will be at your inbox that you’ve already set up. Click the “Settings” link at the top right of your window.

This will bring you to the options/settings menu. Click the “Accounts” link.

So far, so good. Now click the “Add another mail account” link which will bring up a pop-up window.

In the pop-up window enter your full email address into the box and click “Next Step.”

Here’s where details matter, a lot. If your settings here aren’t set up right your email will not get pulled into your Gmail account. So, for your username put what you’d put in at the http://mail.uscm.org page. Same with your password.

POP Server: mail.uscm.org
Port: 110

The only box that must not be checked is the Always use a secure (SSL)… option.

The others are all optional, but I would suggest my set up of pulling all of your mail off the server (that way it will never fill up at the Crusade server. Also, let’s talk about labeling your messages…

Labeling is like putting stuff in folders, but without needing to pull it out of the inbox first. It adds a “label” or a “tag” to it and whether you leave it in your inbox or archive it it will maintain the tag that it has.

First check the Label incoming messages box and pull down the menu to where it says “New Label…”

This pop-up window will come up and you can label it anything you want – shorter is better. I’d suggest UCSM, or Cru or something similar. Hit OK.

There you go. Click Add Account.

Beautiful, now lets make sure you can send mail from your Gmail account and still have people receiving it see it coming from your @uscm.org account.

Obviously, I’m going to have you choose the Yes choice and click Next Step.

You’ll need to verify that you actually own this email address…

When you click Send Verification the Gmail system will send an email to your USCM account that will read something like this:

You have requested to add johnny.crusade@uscm.orgto your Gmail account.
Confirmation code: ########

Before you can send mail from johnny.crusade@uscm.org using your Gmail
account, please click the link below to confirm your
request:

http://mail.google.com/mail/#-##########-johnny.crusde%40uscm.org-###############

If you click the link and it appears to be broken, please copy and paste it
into a new browser window. If you aren’t able to access the link, please log in
to your Gmail account, and click ‘Settings’ at the top of any page.
Open the ‘Accounts’ tab, and locate the email address you’d like to add in the
‘Send mail as:’ section. Then, click ‘Verify,’ and enter your confirmation
code: #######

Thanks for using Gmail!

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

The awesome part about it is that it will probably be in your own inbox now. If it is not, go to your Accounts tab (in Settings) and look for the Check Mail Now link.

When you click the link it should just verify the account and you can now send through your @gmail.com or @uscm.org addresses.

If you go the route of entering the Verification code (given at the beginning and end of the email). The box that popped up when you hit the Verify Now link will look like this:

So, yeah, put the code in there and hit Verify.

What you’ll get is an Accounts tab that looks something like this:

Except that it will have “verified” instead of “unverified” and won’t have a “verify” link and will probably not have the fake @uscm.org address.

Now you can use your Gmail for all* of your email needs. If you need to add other accounts you should be able to get the necessary settings from your email provider.

---

*There’s one exception for the “all” of your needs. The only time that I ever need to sign into the http://mail.uscm.org site is to send out mass emails of 50 or more. Gmail is very touchy about spamming and views anything more than 50 at a time as suspicious and could suspend your ability to send more emails that day, that week or at all! So if you think that something might be interpreted as mass emailing (say more than 30) I’d sign into the uscm.org site to do it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 7:34 pm and is filed under basics, google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.