I have been using GMail for awhile now and I have really come to like their spam filtering. I also have two other personal email accounts from Yahoo and Comcast that I have had for a long time. As much as I like GMail I hated to give the other one’s up, so I was disfunctionally using all three. I knew I could setup GMail to check my comcast mail, but I didn’t see the sense in it because I would still have to go to Yahoo and check my mail there.
I have been getting my Yahoo mail in Outlook Express for awhile now using a program called YahooPops. If you haven’t heard of it, it basically acts like a proxy between your email program and Yahoo. It emulates a browser and downloads your emails and then relays them back to your email program. It goes down occasionally but it’s generally very reliable. When it does go down there’s usually a new update to download pretty quick to fix things.
Anyway, recently I started wondering if I get could this to work by letting GMail pull in my email through YahooPops. It should work right? Just forward the correct ports in my router and voila. Well, it does work like that, but after a few hours of struggling to figure it out I finally ran across this article.
http://forums.ypopsemail.com/post12419.html#p12419
I was surprised that this article was so hard to find, but I finally did after alot of searching. It turns out that I had everything setup right, but the ports I was using wouldn’t work right. As soon as I set the ports in YahooPops, my router, and GMail to 995 everything magically started to work.
Cool right? Well, even cooler is that you can also send email and make it appear that you are sending it from comcast, yahoo, or any other email address that you have.
To accomplish this Google requires you to do a quick verification. GMail will send you an email to the email address you want to “send emails” from. Then you will have to check that email and go back to GMail to enter in that code. This will verify to Google that you own that email address.
You can set it up so that anytime you reply to an email from another email address that it will appear as though you sent it from that email address. So, if you have all your emails coming into your inbox you never have to be concerned about which email address to use to send it.
I setup some filters that archive my external emails as soon as they are received. Using those filters and labeling the emails helps me keep everything seperate, but at the same time allows me to check all my email in one place.
