Gabriel Shirley

I recently returned from a trip to Italy, where I was traveling without a laptop. While I must admit to feeling a bit naked since I tend to take the thing everywhere, I also experienced the freedom of being computer-free, not having the extra weight, and not worrying about losing an essential tool to a theif. Ah, the joy of it all.

But wait, said a little nagging voice inside my head before I left for the trip, what about all that email that will pile up while you’re away? Don’t you owe it to yourself to keep it at bay by checking in and managing your in-box every few days? You’ll be much happier when you return!

Sensible enough. I could easily stop at a local internet cafe every few days to tame the ever active in-box. The only issue was that I have a number of email accounts I use on a regular basis. I have a business account, a personal account, a dot-Mac account, a Gmail account, and a legacy account from my previous company that some folks in my network continue to use even though I’ve asked several times for them to update their information. I didn’t want to check all these accounts separately, so I started looking for a solution that would centralize everything, give me access via the web, and provide an easy transition back to my laptop when I returned from the trip.

Gmail turned out to be an ideal solution. It has a great webmail interface, can connect to other email servers to pull mail into a single in-box AND it provides great features for transitioning back to my regular laptop-based email client when I return. Plus Gmail now backs up all of my email and provides web access to everything, including mail archived long ago.

There’s a bit of setup involved. Here are the details:

Retrieving mail from other servers

1. Log into your Gmail account, click Settings at the top of the page, then click the Accounts tab. Use the Get Mail from Other Accounts section to tell Gmail how to grab your email from other places. I wanted Gmail to download and then delete mail from my other mail servers (not leave a copy on the other servers), so I selected those options. I also use the Label feature to automatically label incoming mail so I know which email account it was sent to and can quickly see all new mail TO my business account.

2. Configure the Send Mail As settings if you want to use Gmail to send FROM your non-Gmail accounts. That way you hit reply and the outgoing message is FROM whichever account the original message was sent TO.

That takes care of retrieving mail. At this point, I could access all of my email via the web using Gmail, so I was good to go on my trip. When I returned, I ran into a couple of additional learning opportunities.

Organizing Email

Warning: Since Gmail uses Labels instead of the more traditional Folders found in most mail clients, I set up all sorts of labels to organize my mail while on the road. When I returned, all of that mail was downloaded to the in-box on my laptop, un-organized once again. Luckily, all of the SPAM had been filtered out, and everything I had deleted or sent was properly organized. I just had to re-file things I had attempted to “file” using Labels.

Returning to my Laptop

I use Apple Mail to access email from my laptop. If you use something different, your settings may vary. Most mail clients have similar capabilities, so you should be able to make it work on your equipment without too much fuss.

When I returned, I decided it would be nice to continue using Gmail to centralize all of my messages. It does a wonderful job of removing SPAM and refusing email with viruses, and I’d prefer not to have that garbage on my laptop in the first place. Here’s what I had to do:

1. Set each email account to NOT automatically retrieve mail.
At first I disabled all accounts other than Gmail, but I discovered that I needed the accounts enabled so that I could send mail FROM those accounts via my laptop. You only need to do this for accounts you need to send mail FROM. Others can be disabled. (I don’t recommend deleting anything until you’re sure it’s working the way you want!)

2. Set the SMTP server for each account to smtp.gmail.com and include your gmail login info for the SMTP connection.
This makes it possible to send ALL mail using the Gmail servers, even mail sent FROM your non-Gmail accounts. It also means that Gmail will store a copy of ALL mail you SEND in the Gmail SENT folder. Now you have a backup of all SENT mail from this date forward.

3. Go back to Gmail Settings and click the Forwarding and POP tab.
Under POP download, it should say POP is enabled. Tell Gmail what you want it to do when messages are accessed via your POP client (e.g. Apple Mail). I use the archive Gmail’s copy option. This bit of magic means that the following will happen:

• Gmail will check my external accounts (about every hour OR whenever I check for new mail)
• All new mail will be in the Gmail in-box
• I can check my mail using the Gmail web interface if I want
• Alternately, I can check my mail from Apple Mail, and all new messages will be downloaded to my local in-box where I can manage them as I see fit, work with them off-line, etc.
  • Instead of deleting the copy on Gmail (as would normally happen when checking mail from a POP server), those messages are archived. They are available for searching in Gmail and can be found using All Mail, but they are no longer in Gmail’s in-box.

That’s it! Now I can be up to date with my email whether I’m using my laptop or someone else’s computer.
PS

If you haven’t already done so, I recommend uploading a copy of your address book to Gmail so you can find your contacts online from any computer, and Gmail will be able to auto-find email addresses when you type someone’s name.