Managing Multiple Email Accounts - Tips and tricks for managing your email accounts

We get a lot of emails everyday, from friends, relatives, newsletters, automatic notifications, and of course spam. Most of us use free email services like Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail etc. These services offer many great features to manage emails, set filters, with very good spam filters. But do we use them to the fullest extent? Now you would say, just because those features are present, its not necessary to use them. But, just think, by using those feature one could actually save time and improve productivity.

Here I present you some tips and tricks to manage emails more efficiently. Gmail being the most popular free email service, I would consider that you are using it too, and also because some of the features are not available in other email services, but rest of them can be used in others too.

So here we go. Some of them may seem too basic, wacky or just going too overboard, but nevertheless they help to some extent.

1] Use multiple email accounts:

Having multiple email accounts set for different purposes, helps you easily distinguish what type of emails are present in a particular account. You can use one email for sending and chatting with all your friends and relatives, one for all online and offline bank accounts, one for all notifications and newsletters, and one for spam. You could better categorize depending on your requirements and usage.

2] Managing multiple email accounts:

Now managing such multiple email accounts can be a daunting task. Fortunately there are many ways to manage them.

a] Email clients can be very useful for this. Thunderbird being the most popular free software, it has many basic features and some nice time saving features too. IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) feature offers a great way to access and delete emails in real time. And the good thing is gmail offers it for free.

b] Email clients are great way to manage, but the features offered in the browser interface and looks are taken off by the email clients. So, how do you access multiple email accounts in browsers:

First method is to use portable version of the popular browsers. You can download them from portableapps.com. Now, you can have multiple copies of them in a safe place in a drive. Configure each of the browser with one each email account and check mark auto login or if the browser offers password saving then use it. Now to login to these accounts you just open the particular copy of the portable browser and it opens right away into the inbox.
For gmail accounts using portable Google Chrome would be the best option, you can actually make the portable version of the latest version by using a program which you can download here: http://portableapps.com/node/19307

Second Method is for Google chrome users. It has an incognito mode which basically lets you surf web without leaving any trace on PC like cookies, history etc. And the cookies during the browsing time are stored in separate folders for each of the incognito window you open. So you can easily have multiple email accounts open at the same time.
But a little Note from gmail:

Even though I use multiple instances of gmail, the accounts didn't got locked up ever. But if you think you want to use this method extensively then you need to think a bit before going for this.

3] Using Folders/Labels effectively:

Now moving a bit offtopic but still relevant, most of the email service offer this feature offer labeling/folder feature. In yahoo and hotmail its known as folders and in gmail its known as labels. Set some filters to automatically send messages to particular folders or apply labels.

Lets the example of my gmail labeling for astahost:

You can assign multiple labels, so that you would easily know if you have a mycent update, by just seeing the label unread count in the right side.

4] Chatting from multiple email accounts:

Almost in every account you may have added chat buddies to chat with. You can use many of the portable chat clients to chat with buddies in multiple email accounts. Or if you use use multiple chat client like digsby then you can easily do that.

You can also open multiple gtalk clients. There is a little neat trick for this. In the gtlak shortcut properties ( You can find it on desktop or Start>Programs), you can open by right clicking the shortcut and selecting properties. Now add "/nomutex" without quotes at the end of target.

There is a space before "/nomutex. Now click OK. Now you can double cli"ck that shortcut icon to launch multiple gtalk windows. You can login into each of them with different accounts and chat. Also you will receieve updates of new emails as and when they arrive. Useful feature and an advantage over using other clients.

 

 

 

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Adding another method to this:

2] Managing multiple email accounts:

c] This method requires that you use Firefox. You need to install the Greasemonkey plugin from the Firefox addons repository. Then install this User script, Google Account Multi-Login. Now, instead of signout link at the top right of gmail account, there will be a drop down box to select from other gmail ID's. For that first specify the username and passwords so that they are saved in the drop down list. Now, whenever you want to change the account just pull that drop down and select your desired account to sign in to. Pretty handy.

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Thanks for the tips. I was unaware of some tips. Like managing multiple accounts. This is great tip. Though my multiple accounts are on different domains. I have to try it to see if it works or not. Is it possible to manage multiple accounts on google apps domain ? If this works this will help me fast access mail from multiple domains i registered with google apps. Let me know if it's possible.


I liked that multiple instances of gtalk tips. This is good especially in case when my brother and i want to stay logged in at the same time. Also google launched their latitude feature which makes it visible for your friends to see where you are. Is it possible to disable such a tracing ? Also if this is possible then logging the IP from Gtalk could be possible as well. If so, how to keep the privacy ? Any idea or ways to work around this ?

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I also wanted to add another thought to the main topic. All this issue of multiple email accounts isn't just about the convenience of managing emails. In fact, it increases the time we sort through our daily emails. The foremost thing why I would like to keep at least two separate email accounts is for privacy reasons. I wouldn't like to share my email ID's which I use for banking, paypal, etc. with the people I meet online, in the forums etc. I think many would agree with me on this. No matter how difficult the passwords are, there is always the risk of somebody trying to sneak into the account. In some forums the emails are displayed publicly (although there is a feature to hide), by mistake if you choose to display the emails, that email ID would soon be scraped by search engines. Well, I would talk about a small incident about this as a new topic.

@starscream: Glad to know it helped you. The methods under '2]' are also applicable to the email accounts of google apps for domains. Even the last method works, that is the one using greasemonkey script for signing into different accounts. It just shows the drop down menu at the top right when logged in with google apps email account as well. By the way, which method are you talking about which you would like to use?

Here's just a small suggestion if you would like to implement. For the multiple email accounts of your google apps account, you could use a master email account which takes in all the mail from those gapps accounts. You just to need to go to Settings, Forwarding, there just specify the email id of master email account to forward to. This way you needn't cycle through all those accounts individually to check new mails, you could just check the master account. Also, there is a feature wherein, you can send emails from the master account to look like they have been sent from other accounts. So you can use this feature to reply/send emails as the slave accounts to the mails arriving on the master email account. Hope I didn't confuse you there.

About the Google latitude feature, I happened to see that on a social networking site, Orkut. And now when I searched on google, I came to know that the feature is available separately on google website. Its pretty interesting. I haven't used it, so I have no idea about the privacy issues you are talking about. Hopefully there should be a way to disable the tracking of ones own location, but as I said I have no idea how this thing works. so cant talk about it. May be somebody more knowledgable about this topic can answer those questions.

 

 

 

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@Spencer, i'm going to try the greasemonkey script for a way to handle multiple gmail account. As i've multiple domains on google apps. This tip i was talking about. I'll try this one as i think greasemonkey one is good trick to work with multiple domains.

Also your suggestion of getting email to master address sounds great. It can solve many problems but i was unsure about saving messages as they arrive. I have no idea how google will sort that out on master email address. Let me give it a try and see if it works.

About latitude feature, they have option about not to show the location. But i doubt google privacy. Also is it possible that our IP address is visible from gtalk ? or any chat client which makes use of gtalk API ? like Ebuddy, meebo ? Is it possible ? Why i'm asking this is because i've seen people snooping via orkut with help of this feature. And i expect privacy in social network, IM etc. Why there is security issue like display or retrieval of IP address ? I'll find that out by asking on superuser site and on google forums. I'll update on astahost if i find way to keep privacy with gtalk and orkut.

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That was helpful.

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Many of us have to manage email accounts using multiple services, especially if we access work mail through POP or IMAP. Here is an example using Apple's Mail program and some tips if you have a custom domain (such as being a hosted member on Astahost).

Apple's Mail has some fairly nice features for managing multiple accounts, but it is not the only standalone mail program to do so. Once you see what can be done here, you will know what to look for in the documentation in your own mail program. Mozilla's Thunderbird, for instance, can do pretty much everything I am about to describe.

Setting Up Multiple Accounts

You can set up any number of separate mail accounts in Apple Mail. You do this from the Accounts Tab of the Preferences screen. Open Preferences from the Mail Menu and select Accounts from the top. The plus sign (+) at the bottom left will add a new account and let you fill in the information.

When you have created several accounts, you will see them under INBOX on the left side of the main Mail Window. Clicking on INBOX will show you all new mail for all accounts. You can sort by date or sender, for instance, and the mail in every inbox will be sorted into one list. You can go through new email in order without worrying about which account it came to. The same goes for Trash, Sent Mail, and so forth.

If you want to specifically go through the inbox of one account, click on the arrow next to the INBOX icon to expand the list. Now you will see each account listed separately. Clicking on one will let you see only the mail in that account, and, again, you can sort it whatever way you wish. This means I can sit down and go through all mail in order or, if in a hurry, I can just go through new messages in Sales.

You can create folders to organize and file your emails by clicking the plus (+) on the bottom-left-side of the window, under the folder/account listing. You can save messages to folders which can be stored locally on your computer, or, if you are using IMAP, stored back on the server. This lets you use Apple Mail to access email at home but still use a web-based email system on travel. For instance, if I set up GMail to use IMAP and create new folders under my GMail account, I can sort mail in Apple Mail and still access my saved messages later through the web. I can do the same thing with email accounts created from CPanel in my own hosting account (e.g. from Astahost) and then use SquirrelMail to access the messages from somewhere else. If I have an online business and have, for instance, a "Sales" email account, I can store sorted messages in a folder, say "New Orders" under the account using IMAP, and my lovely wife can also access the same messages from her computer.



Chatting

Mail does support a "buddy status" and integrates with Apple's iChat program (which supports a few different chat protocols). This makes it possible to handle multiple chat systems all from the same place. There is a buddy status icon that looks like a dialog bubble for each message in the list of messages. One click will launch a chat session with that person (using their chat information from your address book).

Managing Mail Through Multiple Accounts

In my Mail setup, I have a GMail account, a set of accounts through my own domain for our family business (my personal, "eric", business mailbox, a Sales account, an Editor account (for comments on online articles), and a Vendor account), and a couple of accounts for a political organization whose domain I also operate. Mail makes managing all these accounts fairly easy and even makes mingling accounts straightforward. I can receive a mail in my Sales account and respond to it from my "eric" mailbox. My wife, in turn, can respond from her "cathi" account. You do this by hitting reply, and selecting the correct outgoing email address from a drop-down menu. The client only has to send email to one account, either of us can field the message and respond. The client then knows who they are talking to and the conversation continues smoothly from there. Either of us can then store the conversation, if desired, back in a folder under Sales. That way if, for instance, she is not around, I can look and see what is going on and respond to a phone call from the client.

But, there is more.

My GMail account receives mail through a forwarding system, pobox.com. I have multiple email addresses through pobox which all go to my GMail account. I don't want to have to configure a separate Mail account for each one because then Mail will want a separate incoming mail server. I had to enter dummy information in Apple Mail before OS 10.5 to accomplish this, which was ugly and annoying (it would keep trying to connect to "none" to try to fetch mail). Now it is very simple. I just enter multiple email addresses in the "Email Address" box for my GMail account on the accounts tab. For example, I can enter: "foo@gmail.com, foo@pobox.com, bar@pobox.com, tavern@pobox.com". This means that GMail now receives mail for all of these addresses. What does this buy me? I can receive the message through GMail and SEND replies through any of the pobox.com accounts, just like I can send from "eric" or Sales. People communicating with me through my pobox.com forwarders do not need to know I am using GMail, which is good, since the whole point is that I do not need to tell them if I stop using GMail and start using something else.

I have a number of similar accounts for the business that all come to "eric" as well, such as webmaster and postmaster for the domains. If I am corresponding with a system administrator about a security problem, for instance, I can use the official webmaster account. Otherwise it all comes to the same place. Altogether, I handle maybe two-dozen email addresses with a very simple setup. This has a very important advantage for setting up accounts with possibly shady websites and combating SPAM. With my domains under Astahost, they let me set up an unlimited number of email addresses. I can create a new email address just for dealing with one suspect site and forward it to one I check all the time. If I start getting SPAM through that address, I know who leaked my information. I can separate it out into its own account so I can skip its messages when I want to, or I can simply delete that account and have my server automatically bounce all of the junk. Mailboxes are cheap. I can name them according to their purpose, e.g. shadysite@mydomain.com, or randomly, like 145jmfh@mydomain.com.

Using Rules

Lastly, Mail lets you set up rules that can be used to automatically sort mail. I use these sparingly, but they are a great help when I do. They can be as simple as alerting me when I get a message from a particular client (or deleting mail from an annoying person on a mailing list; I have four or five names in my "kill file" as we used to call it) or as complex as the junk mail filter. These are accessed under the Rules tab of the Preferences window.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion, Apple's Mail does a good job of making complex email setups easy to manage, but whatever you are using, it is worth exploring some of the features available for making your organizational tasks easier. If you use an online mail system exclusively, consider the power of a standalone mail program. Even the old text-terminal-based ELM or PINE is more powerful than the best webmail system. With IMAP, you can have the best of both worlds: the power of a standalone program at home, and lightweight webmail access when you need it.

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