Using A Gmail Account to Handle Multiple Email Accounts 2016 Edition

2016-08-07


We introduced information which was about using Single Gmail to Receive / Send emails for multiple email account before, but it is 2016 now, Google has done some modifications on this feature of Gmail, and we realized it is not that easy which we thought. Let’s record this process today.

Why We Use A Gmail Account to Handle Multiple Email Accounts ?

The answer should be simple if you do not use a local email software such as the traditional outlook tool. Newer cloud technologies allow us handle all of our emails online, we do not need to store the emails on our local computer, The online Email services have become be robust, they are much better than a local email tool now.

So how to handle our online email account is a computer task which we should care about.

Most of computer users have multiple email accounts which are from different email service providers such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc. If we use a single email account to receive / send emails for all of our email accounts, it can be helpful very much on emails, it is convenient for us to handle our emails online, we do not need to open our email account one by one through different websites, we only need to open one Email account and receive or send all emails for all different Email accounts.

Gmail service can provide this kind of feature.

How Gmail Handles Multiple Email Accounts ?

If you used local email tool such as outlook, you should understand how Gmail can handle multiple email accounts, it still uses the same technology POP3 and SMTP but just changed the target to be online.

Since our case is using a Gmail to handle another Gmail account, which will do some extra steps compared with other email providers maybe.

Part 1:

The first part we should set something on another Gmail, so that it allows forwarding emails to other Gmail account.

_ (actually the Gmail has already done this settings by default, if you did not change this setting before, you might skip this part)_

Note, all Gmail settings are from the the setting gear icon on the top right corner. The following is a sample:

image On the setting page, select “**Forwarding and POP/IMAP**” tab, you can set handling other email services here; If you want to all emails are forwarded to new Gmail account, check on the Enable **POP for all mail**, but in our case, we only want to **Enable POP for mail that arrive from now on**, so we checked on the second option; And the we keep the option “**When messages are accessed with POP**” to “**Keep Gmail’s copy in the inbox**”: image Then click the **Save Changes** button. **Part 2:** Now we go to **the second part**, which we set on our major Gmail account which handle other email accounts: On the setting page, select “**Accounts and Import**” tab, you can set handling other email services here; Firstly we click “Add a POP3 mail account you own” to receive an email which we want to be checked by current Gmail account. image Add your target email account: image Here we use adding another Gmail account as the sample, Gmail will fill the POP Server automatically for us since the target email is still a Gmail account which Google knows exactly. When you add other emails account which are not from Google but are known well such as Microsoft or Yahoo, the POP Server will still be filled automatically since their POP servers are popular, if you meet the POP server does not work, you should find out and fill the correct POP server by yourself. image Gmail has rules to forward emails, so here** we must keep to uncheck** the option “**Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server**”; You might also want to label all incoming emails are from target email account as their email account name, so you check on “**Label incoming messages**” option. Now we should be able to click the button Add Account to make everything work. However, we saw the following error message: **Server denied POP3 access for the given username and password.** image **So what’s happened ? Seems we have already set everything which Gmail requested, right ? So why it was still not working ?** We spent some time to try to figure out why we got denied message. We finally found there was a new email in the Gmail box which was to be added to our major Gmail box, the content was about Reviewing sign-in from a less secure app, the content is like this: image **So seems we should have to do extra security steps ?** Let’s click the **ALLOW ACCESS** button in the email. Now we get a new option which we never seen before, Google asks us to decide whether we want to turn on “**Access for less secure apps**”, we did not find related introduction information about this setting, but we guessed it should be the reason why we got Gmail forwarding denied. so we selected Turn On option: image Now let’s go back to continue adding the POP server information for forwarding Gmail, this time we can get successful message: Your mail account has been added image Now we should decide whether we want to send future email for the added account as its original Gmail name, normally it is just we want to do, so we select **Yes** option in above screen, and click **Next Step** button, we will have more steps to do. We give a sender name for the Gmail: image Now the system asks to verify our added Gmail address, click **Send** **Verification** button to continue image Now go back to the added Gmail to check the confirmation code, and fill in the textbox, click **Verify** button: image After the above verifying process done, you will find you have set done all requested steps, now you can use your major single Gmail account to receive / send emails for another Gmail account which you added just now. For any other Email services providers other than Gmail, you can get similar setting steps which we introduced above, or, they might be even more simple than Gmail account forwarding.