I've been using a single address from ISP's email service all my life, but I've never been too keen on access to all my accounts relying on a subscription to one company. Lately spam has also started to become an issue so I finally decided to take the plunge and start fresh on Gmail, and do it smart while I'm at it. My original plan was to have a completely separate account for trusted services, one for game stuff and one for normal things like forums. This has some security benefits, but it's also a hassle to keep tabs on. I know google lets you "add" additional accounts, but it has to be done on each device and each browser you use and even then you have to flick between the accounts instead of seeing everything on one page. I could use Thunderbird to bring it all together but that still doesn't give me easy web-based access. The other option I see is to have one account and just use an alias on every website, that way if someone loses or sells my info I can at least filter out the resulting spam, however I would then have all my eggs in one basket again. I'd be using aliases in both cases anyways so the main draw here is convenience. What does bit-tech think? Is there a better way to set things up?
I was going to say that you can use the "all inboxes" option to see all emails from all account's inboxes at once, but when i looked in gmail (via chrome on my pc) I cant find it. Its definitely there on my nexus 7 android app, but not on the desktop version... shame.
You can get Gmail to check other email accounts (Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Check mail from other accounts (using POP3)) and enable POP3 for the other accounts. I've got it set up so these other accounts go into their own label, and have also got it set up so that I can reply as these accounts. I believe this counts for all devices and PCs that you access Gmail from.
That was the game changer I needed, thanks badders! Webmail acting as a pop3 client, what a time to be alive.
Gmail is great, as badders said, you can pick up mail from other POP accounts. You can even send as them as well. One word of caution I have just set my Gmail up to pick up email from our website email addresses and have noticed that the time intervals between fetching can get a little long sometimes. You can always manually check, if you are expecting an email, but that's a pita.
