Are you using a dozen different email accounts to separate your personal / work / shopping / spam / etc.? Is it driving you, your friends, and family bonkers? There is hope! Using the Send mail as and Check mail from other accounts features in G Suite/Gmail you can receive email from all your accounts in a single G Suite/Gmail account. One email account to rule them all!

Step 1: Getting Started

First, pick an account that is low importance and receives enough email that you can practice sending and receiving from your Gmail account. With those email credentials in hand, surf over to the G Suite/Gmail Settings->Accounts and look for the Send mail as and Check mail from other accounts menu options.

Those two features allow you to combine your multiple accounts and control how people reply to your email. For this example I will add the [email protected] account to my personal account.

Step 2: Check mail from other accounts (Add a mail account)

Select the Check mail from other accounts and add your IMAP or POP settings. Check the Label incoming messages and Gmail will tag each email received from this account so that you will always know how it arrived in your inbox. When you click Add Account GMail will pull and update all your email so you never have to check that account again!

Step 3: Send mail as (Add another email address you own)

Send mail as allows me to reply, from my [email protected] account, as [email protected]. No one is the wiser and I now have two less email accounts to monitor. Sure, if someone looks at the email headers they can tell but hey, who is going to do that?

For this to work, uncheck the Treat as an alias option. If not, all reply-from emails will be from my [email protected] account. You can change this setting when you are ready to retire the gamer account.

Google does a great explanation:

Example: Ben is Mary’s personal assistant. Ben often needs to send email on behalf of Mary, and he uses Send mail as to send emails for Mary from her [email protected] account using his [email protected] account. Because Ben and Mary email each other often, it’s confusing for Ben to see his emails to Mary appear as unread in his Inbox. Also, when Ben composes a reply to Mary’s email, the To: field shows his primary email address

In this case, Ben should turn off the default Treat as an alias setting. With Treat as an alias turned off, Ben’s emails to Mary will appear in his Sent mail and not in his Inbox, and when he composes a reply to Mary’s email, the To: field will show Mary’s primary email address.

At some later date…closing old email accounts

Once I update all my mailing lists with the new email address I can close out the old accounts. Because Google continues to tag emails received from those accounts and I can watch the email volume dwindle. I always know when to update some straggler service.

Finally, when I am ready to stop impersonating the old accounts, I need to go back and check the Treat as an alias option. All my reply-from emails will then be from my [email protected] account!

Contact me to learn more about how G Suite can simplify your digital life! I’ll even through in a 20% off your first year of G Suite service!