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.

Well, today I want to share another walk-through, this time we’ll take a spin around what you can see from the Inbox view. Click the image to start the walk-through

Let me know in the comments if you’ve decided to set up a Gmail account.

Some advantages:
• Free. Anyone can sign up for it. There are extras that you can pay for, but not really necessary.
• Storage space. By the time you read this there will be more than 6.5 GB (gigabytes) of it. If every email you send or receive is 50 KB (pretty big for an email without an attachment) that allows for almost 21,000 emails before it’s full. (You can add 10 GB more for $20/year.)
• Growing storage space. It’s estimated that Gmail is adding 3.3 MB daily (67 of those hypothetical emails).
• POP and IMAP access. POP and IMAP are the primary ways that programs like Outlook and Thunderbird bring in emails from the web. This can make your email available anywhere.
• Incoming POP access. This is how I do all of my email from my Gmail account. You are able to have Gmail pull in your USCM.org (or CCCI.org) email and store it in Gmail – this also works for your internet service provider account (Verizon, Comcast, etc.). You can even have Gmail send emails from those accounts.
• Keyboard shortcut navigation. This is a great feature in any program for working quickly and efficiently, we’ll learn about this in future posts.
• Multiple accounts built into one. If you sign up for johnny.crusade@gmail.com you also own johnnycrusade@gmail.com, j.o.h.n.n.y.c.r.u.s.a.d.e@gmail.com (or anything in between) as well as johnny.crusade@googlemail.com. You can also add words to it with a plus; for example johnny.crusade+ebay@gmail.com for all of your eBay stuff so if you start getting spam you know who has been selling your email address.
• Search don’t sort. Remember, Gmail is from Google – a search engine. Gmail can instantly find old emails as you search for them. It’s quick and thorough. There are also advanced searches that you can use… we’ll look at them closer in a future post.
• Sort if you must. Gmail can sort emails just like Outlook into categories (called tags) – the main difference is that you can have multiple tags on one email. So, if you have a student who is a leader at one of your schools but is also attending the summer project you’re directing you can label his email both “Podunk State” as well as “OCMD Summer Project”
• Filters. You can have Gmail automatically filter things depending on what email it was sent from, or sent to, or words that are in the email itself… or by about a thousand other things.
• Threaded Conversations. Gmail will group related emails together as a “conversation” so that you don’t have to flip back and forth between individual emails between you and someone else. It will group them together in order so that you can read them all at once. Honestly, this may be the main feature that changes the way you read email.
• FREE!

If I have convinced you (and really, what more could you ask for?) take a look at the walk-through that I put together a few months ago.

We’ll walk through the Inbox next.