Adding a New Email Account in GMail
To add your new website email account(s) to your GMail account you will first need an existing GMail account and the following details which are typically provided when your website email account is setup:
- Email Address: this is your website email address eg. info@mywebsite.com or myname@mywebsite.com etc.
- Username: this is usually the exact same as the email address itself
- Password: a case-sensitive password
- Incoming Server: this is the address to the server where emails that have been sent to you are accessed and downloaded from. Typically this is set as your website domain eg. mywebsite.com or sometimes a subdomain like mail.mywebsite.com
POP3 or IMAP
When using GMail to access website email accounts we recommend using the POP3 protocol which will download emails from your website's mail hosting server and store them in the cloud on GMail servers. At time of writing the storage limit on a free GMail account is 15GB whereas the storage available on your website's mail server is likely to be much smaller. Therefore by using the POP3 protocol it will automatically prevent the email quota on your website's mail server from filling up over time.
Setup Steps for GMail
The following steps should be carried out on a computer, however once the new email account is added it will be accessible on all devices and email clients that connect to your GMail account.
- Sign into your Gmail account
- Click the cog icon (top right of page) and click Settings from the the dropdown menu.
- Click the Accounts tab.
- In the "Check mail from other accounts" section, click "Add a mail account".
- Enter the email address you want to add and then click Next.
At this stage follow the online prompts to finish the process and enter any requested details for your email account.
During the setup process you may see the following options:
"Leave a copy of message on server" - we recommend unchecking this option to prevent the email quota on your website's mail server from filling up over time. GMail will retereive all your emails and store them online in your GMail account. You can choose to leave emails on the server if you are downloading and managing your emails on more than one email client but if you are only using GMail to access your emails you won't need it.
"Always use a secure connection" - depending on how your websites email server is setup you may need to check or uncheck this option.
Once the email account has been successfully added GMail will connect to your website's email server periodically to download any new messages and they will then appear in your GMail inbox.
GMail checks for new emails at timed intervals which vary depending on how often it retrieves new email. If no new emails are retreived GMail will wait a bit longer to check next time, if there are new emails GMail will check a bit sooner next time. This is the default behaviour of GMail when checking other added email accounts but you can also force GMail to check immidiately for new emails at any time by going into Settings -> Accounts and clicking the "Check mail now" link beside the added email account. Clicking the refresh button at the top of the GMail web interface should also fetch any new emails from added POP3 accounts.
Send & Reply from your Website Email Address
To send and reply from your website email address in GMail go to Settings -> Accounts and add your website email address under the "Send mail as:" option and check "Reply from the same address to which the message was sent". This will allow you to send emails from either your main GMail account email address or your added website email address. When composing an email just select the appropriate email address in the "From" field and when replying to emails it should automatically select the appropriate "Reply from" email address.
Alternatively you can just add your website email address as an alias to your main GMail address which means you will still get emails from your added website email address but emails and replys you send will come from your main GMail email address.
Oragnising your email in GMail
In GMail you can setup filters to help organise your work and personnal emails.
For more information and help on using GMail check out the official Google support pages for GMail.
