2 Easy Ways to Manage Multiple Email Accounts
Today’s topic is how to deal with multiple email inboxes. Listener Jodie Kirby, the recruiting yogini, writes in:
I’m struggling! I’m a consultant managing multiple Google and Office 365 accounts. I’m making it work and yet there’s gotta be an elegant solution. Help! – Namaste
Jodie, when you want elegance, the place to turn is, of course, England. Because they have such delightful accents and castles. And the Buckingham Palace guards.
Fortunately, we’re in luck! Grandma Cuddles’ Day Care center is welcoming Claire, their newest employee. She’s come over from England, where she claims she was a landscape architect. She was known for designing parks and charming little lanes in the English countryside. Whether it’s a riverbank that resists global warming, or an innocent little park that corrals zombies into dead-end paths and…neutralizes them, Claire is up to any challenge.
Best of all, Claire just loves little children!
Claire: I do! Especially with chocolate sauce. That’s how I got my nickname, Chocolatey Claire.
Oh, my! Chocolatey Claire has quite a sense of humor! She’s coming on board to be Director of Procurement.
Claire: I’m looking forward to the job. It’s right up my alley. Literally. The Pied Piper of Cuddles is how I like to think of it.
Cuddles plans to have Claire design a pleasant garden for the kids to play in. It will, of course, be bordered by Audrey IIs, so the little tykes don’t accidentally wander astray. And if one does, there won’t be any evidence.
Claire: Audrey IIs are an attractive-yet-functional addition to any landscape.
Email Accounts Propagate
Claire’s first task is to get all her tech set up. She’s at the center of a vast web of communication. Her work on global warming happens at Claire's email. Her private clients email her as Claire's shrubberythatslays, and of course, she’s now
Claire's email as well. It’s a mess! Every day she has to remember to check three email accounts, and things fall through the cracks on a regular basis.
The human race uses many email systems. Too many. They have different capabilities and don’t necessarily all play nice with each other. We’re going to get Claire sorted by using one of two solutions that should work for all email systems.
The program you run to read your email is called your “email client.” Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Outlook.com, and Gmail are all email clients. Your actual email comes in to a central email server and your email client fetches it from the server, displays it, and lets you send outgoing email.
You can use several different clients with one server. If you have email that comes in to a Gmail account, you could read and reply from that same account in Gmail, from Apple Mail, or from Outlook. Messages you move, read, delete, or reply to in one client will show up with those same changes when you access the account on another client.
Method One: Check Many Inboxes
Most email clients can check multiple email addresses. Then you choose which inbox you want to view. When you respond to a message in a particular inbox, that’s the address your message comes from.
Claire can configure Apple Mail to check all three of her accounts. When claire@shrubberythatslays.comcreate new email gets a message from her supplier, saying that her 6-foot-tall experimental Venus Flytraps have come in, it shows up in her ShrubberyThatSlays inbox in Apple Mail. When she clicks Reply, the reply comes from claire@shrubberythatslays.comcreate new email
When she gets a message to claire@dontfrytheworld.comcreate new email, that’s a separate inbox, and her replies come from that email address.
When Claire is saving the world, she goes to her dontfrytheworld.com inbox. When she’s procuring new young recruits for Grandma Cuddles, she goes to her grandmacuddles.com inbox. When she’s planting a hillside that can swallow human traffickers in a single gulp (really several gulps. Her Venus Flytraps aren’t that big), she goes to her shrubberythatslays.com inbox.
She can also go to All Inboxes and see a view that has all the messages from all of her inboxes. When she opens and responds to a message, her response comes from the address of that message’s inbox.
Each email client sets up multiple inboxes differently
To find out how your email client can handle multiple accounts, Google “multiple email accounts in …" and the name of the program you use to read email. For example, “multiple email accounts in outlook" or “multiple email accounts in gmail.” At the end of this episode, I’ll quickly run through how to set up multiple email accounts in Gmail, Apple Mail, and iOS.
Microsoft Outlook is a horror show. There are a dozen versions, many platforms, and all of them are different. Consult your help file to find out how to set up your particular version. You may have to set up multiple “profiles,” each of which corresponds to a single email account. When you start Outlook, you choose which profile you want to use, and everything you do during that session relates solely to the profile you chose.
Method Two: Forward Everything to One Central Inbox
Another option is to create one central inbox where all your email will be forwarded. Then you read and reply from that inbox. First, get an email account to use as your unified inbox. You will never give anyone this email address directly.
Then, you set up all your existing email accounts to forward to this one account. For example, Claire sets up her central inbox using Fastmail.com at the email address Destroyer of Worlds' email (That’s cute…). She then sets all of her other accounts to forward incoming email to her fastmail.com account.
Her email client only needs to check mail from the single DestroyerOfWorlds@fastmail.com account to get all her mail.
How do you set up forwarding? Like all things tech, it depends. Generally your mail server—or if you have your own domain, your domain registrar—gives you a way to set up forwarding.
Google “how to forward email in …" and the name of your email service provider. For example, “how to forward email in namecheap" or “how to forward email in gmail.” Forward all your email to your unified inbox.
Clair discovers only one problem…when she replies to a message, her From field is filled in with Claire's email. Even though she’s receiving her email from a single email account, she wants to be able to reply and send outgoing email from any one of her addresses.
Be like Sybil: use multiple personalities
Many email clients let you set up custom From: addresses. When you compose an email, you can use a drop-down menu to select which address you send from.
In some email clients, these are called personalities. Some email clients just allow you to enter the alternate From addresses and don’t give them a special name.
You can find out how to change the From address in your email client by Googling “change from address in…" and the name of your email program. For example, “change from address in outlook.”
Looking at all the cheery young faces being processed through Grandma Cuddles, the shady lanes, the happy, well-fed Audrey IIs, and the defense department contracts that are going to make her stock options worth millions, Claire realizes that this may be where she’s meant to be. She decides to go all-in and consolidate everything with the Cuddles Empire.
She opts for technique two and forwards all her email accounts to claire@Grandmacuddles.comcreate new email. She quickly configures her email clients to be able to send email from any of her addresses, and tests it out by ordering a 55 gallon drum of chocolate sauce. She licks her lips in anticipation and settles in for a long and profitable career with Grandma.
Claire: My goodness! It’s almost dinner time.
Having a Director of Procurement will help Grandma Cuddles sleep better at night. It’s early in Claire’s tenure, but if her ability to whip her email into shape is any indication, the Grandma Cuddles family is going to get a taste of Claire’s sweet (and oh-so-extreme) powers of procurement.
There are two ways to manage multiple email accounts. Choose the one you like best. First is configuring the different email clients you use to check all your email accounts. You then switch to one email account, read and reply to messages in that account, and switch to another. The other system is to forward all your incoming email to a single inbox, and use email personalities to reply from that inbox, with the From field changed to the appropriate email address.
For instructions on how to set all this up from a few standard email clients, visit getitdoneguy emailsetup.
How To: Add Email Accounts to Your Client
In iOS:
Add email accounts to your client like this:
- Choose: Settings ▸ Passwords and Accounts ▸ Add Account
- Now, multiple inboxes will show up in your Apple Mail folder hierarchy, one for each of the accounts. Ditto for Drafts and Sent and Trash.
- Use Settings ▸ Mail scroll to the bottom and choose the account to send from as Default account.
- If that account has multiple From addresses, you choose the From address in the Settings ▸ Passwords & Accounts ▸ [email account] ▸ Account ▸ Email then choose the personality to use.
Set up multiple personalities that change the From line, but get sent out from the same account:
- Tap: Settings ▸ Passwords & Accounts
- Choose the account
- Choose the line that says Email
- Here you can add or remove From: identities
In Apple Mail:
Check multiple email accounts in Apple Mail:
- Choose: Mail ▸ Preferences ▸ Accounts
- Click on the + in the lower left
- Fill in the server information for your new mail account
- Now, multiple inboxes will show up in your Apple Mail folder hierarchy, one for each of the accounts. Ditto for Drafts and Sent and Trash.
- On the Preferences tab Composing the Addressing section lets you choose which email address to Send new messages from. You can choose one specific account to be your outgoing account, or let Mail figure out which account to use.
Add multiple personalities to one email account in Apple Mail:
- Choose: Mail ▸ Preferences ▸ Accounts
- Set up the master account
- Choose the Account Information tab
- Where it says Email Address, choose Edit Email Addresses
- Now you can add and remove email addresses that all get sent from this account.
Very important note: you can only create multiple personalities for non-iCloud accounts. You can’t create multiple personalities for email addresess that end in @icloud.com or @mac.com or @me.com.
In Gmail:
Set up multiple email accounts in Gmail:
- Choose: Gear ▸ Settings
- Choose Tab: Accounts and Import
- In section Check mail from other accounts click Add a mail account and follow the prompts.
Set up multiple personalities in Gmail:
- Choose: Gear ▸ Settings
- Choose Tab: Accounts and Import
- In section Send Mail As click Add another email address and follow the instructions.
- Click make default by the From address you want to use by default
It’s very similar to adding a new account to check. It will let you change the From address on email you send from your Gmail account, but Gmail adds the twist that it will send the email from a given alternate personality by sending through that personality’s mail servers.
For Outlook:
There are so many different varieties of Outlook that I can’t give definitive instructions here. There’s Outlook for Windows, Outlook for the MAC, and Outlook.com. Please check your outlook documentation for how to check multiple email accounts, and how to send email from multiple email addresses.
I’m Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. If you’re self-employed or a small businessperson, Get-it-Done groups help you stay focused on what’s important, and develop the habits you need for consistent, successful progress. Learn more at Stever Robbins.
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
