Your Guide to Getting Productive with Gmail: Account Consolidation

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Gmail is a powerful tool, just many users of this service aren't borer into its full potential. To help you lot get more productive and get the nearly out of Gmail, I'thou going to spend the next few articles talking about the most effective features of the software and the techniques and practices you lot can employ to make the about of it.

In this first installation, we'll talk nearly business relationship consolidation. This will brand your life easier by a g times (yep, yeah, hyperbole – or then you say for now!) if you're not already doing this. Here's what we're going to do:

Brand it Your Central Electronic mail Inbox

Today, most people have at to the lowest degree two email accounts and usually more. Through my own projects, personal accounts, and working with clients closely enough to warrant them providing me with an electronic mail address, I've amassed close to twenty (active) accounts.

Having twenty email accounts is a bad, bad matter for productivity. As Dustin has mentioned in his Back to Basics commodity, the fewer inboxes you have, the amend; it ways less gamble that something will skid through the cracks and fewer places you lot accept to remember to cheque each day for new information.

Gmail provides a number of ways for you to turn those multiple inboxes into one unmarried place. When you lot're filtering all those different accounts into i place without losing the ability to reply using the address they were sent to, your inbox hell problem has been solved. Here's how to consolidate this part of your life.

i. Fix up the Send postal service as characteristic.

The showtime thing you demand to do is get to the Accounts tab under Gmail's Settings. This is where you can ready Gmail to ship mail service as if it were sent from your other email addresses. In order to maintain professionalism and to go on the mail sorted using Gmail's filters, this is important.

Click the "Add another electronic mail address" link and follow the steps. A confirmation message will be sent to your account, to prevent spoofing, and one time you've confirmed that yous are who you say y'all are, y'all'll exist able to send electronic mail from that account.

Rinse and echo until every account you intend to filter into Gmail has been fix upwardly.

2. Get your email out of your other inboxes and into Gmail.

There are ii ways you can get the email from your other accounts to finish up in your Gmail account; forwarding or POP3. Forwarding is a ameliorate long-term choice, since Gmail only allows yous to prepare v POP3 accounts, and only checks your accounts from time to fourth dimension. If you forrad your electronic mail from your existing account and into Gmail, the emails are pushed through automatically and you lot can do this for every bit many accounts equally yous take.

However, to keep your annal of e-mail centralized, should you ever need to find of import old emails (using Gmail's fantabulous search facilities), POP3 will come in handy at outset. Ready up your accounts under Settings > Accounts to download everything via POP3, five at a time. The setup process gives y'all the option to specify a label for the business relationship, which you should do from the start.

When you lot're done, head into your other account's settings and fix them all to forrad to your main Gmail account. Only one time you've set forwarding up should you return to Gmail and remove the POP3 accounts or you might miss out on some emails.

If you don't have email archives on your electronic mail server, merely instead in your email application, don't worry – you can still go them into the account. I used Apple tree Mail to migrate everything, so information technology might vary somewhat from program to program. Head into your Gmail webmail interface and set up labels for each of your accounts. Then go back to your desktop email application and set your Gmail account up using IMAP (non POP3). You should see your labels nether that business relationship. Select all your email from a given account and drag it to that label. Using Apple tree Mail service, this removed the emails from my difficult drive as information technology uploaded each one, so make a backup before you brainstorm if you wish to proceed offline archives as well.

I once did this with a very old e-mail account that had an annal count in five figures. Information technology takes time, so exist patient, and perhaps set up it up before heading to bed.

3. Ensure your accounts are all heading into the right labels.

Having every email from every account flood into your inbox is going to be organizational hell. Make sure that y'all gear up your labels and filters correctly while you were completing step 2. If you downloaded your email from IMAP and then set it to forward to Gmail, you may take missed this step. Here's how to exercise it:

Head to Settings and click on the Filters tab. Click on Create a new filter and fill in the email account you've redirected to Gmail in the To: field. This will specify that whenever an email is received that has been sent to that account, it volition be processed with this filter.

Click Side by side Step and tick Skip the Inbox and Utilize the Label, selecting the appropriate label from the dropdown carte (this is the label you lot fix up in pace 2). Click the Create Filter push button and you're good to go.

Utilize the All Mail Characteristic

So, at present you want to batch procedure all of your new electronic mail. Switching betwixt labels to deal with letters from each account is a bit similar get-go-end traffic; it takes a while to become anywhere, though y'all eventually practice. Fortunately, nosotros've got the prominent only seldom-used All Mail characteristic.

All Mail is actually just a glorified label that is automatically applied to every unmarried message (though the label is not a visible one). It lets you see all your messages in ane identify; every bit elementary as that is, when you become upwardly to check your electronic mail in the morn, flicking into All Mail allows you to power through them one by one without stopping to navigate from label to label. It's not uncommon to put ane label off because "nothing of import happens in there anyway" and this sabotages the entire signal of batch processing.

I used to do this myself, peculiarly with one detail account that had ended up receiving little human electronic mail and a lot of mailing list traffic. Using All Postal service forced me to get out of my procrastination zone and deal with each message. The first few days were spent by unsubscribing from a lot of lists and, if the content was valuable, switching to an RSS feed. If they didn't make a feed available for the same content, I just completely wrote them off (and then there's a lesson for you email marketers reading this). Since doing this, I spend more of my email time dealing with humans and less fighting useless majority e-mail (and got rid of the fiddling guilt for not processing all my mail properly).

Your next installment coming soon!

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Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/your-guide-to-getting-productive-with-gmail-account-consolidation.html

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