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More and more people are running their own email servers (@yourdomain.com). I myself have active email addresses from 6 different domain names, and never feel intimidated as I’ve achieved email zen thanks to GMail. GMail has POP3/IMAP and “Send As…” capabilities making it an extremely usable hub for all email. More importantly, it has the absolute best spam filter on the planet, which is important if you push your email to a hand held device.
My openTRAY.com email address is out there. It’s been posted on forums, blogs, and various other places spam bots condemn the address. I get around 20-30 spam emails every day. Having all this pushed to my Blackberry is simply annoying. While I do have a spam filter setup on the openTRAY.com email server, it doesn’t quite cut it, and I don’t want to spend money on some elaborate corporate filter.
This is where GMail comes in handy with its super ninja spam filter.
Sign up for a GMail account. The user name is not important as you won’t actually be sending emails from this address, nor will you need to give out that address to your correspondents.
Once signed up and logged in, we need throw all of our emails into GMail. The best way to do this is by using a simple forwarder. You may need to get in touch with the person that handles your email server to figure out how to do this. We have cPanel installed on our server, so I’m going to log into my email there and forward all my email to my new GMail account.
Once I got my @opentray.com forwarder set up, I no longer read those emails like I usually do. I now log into GMail and recieve all the mail there. Now we need to set up sending mail from gmail.com so that it sends as iblizz@opentray.com. Go into your account settings, and looking inside the “Accounts and Import” tab. You see see a button on that page somewhere that reads, “Send mail from another address.” Go about setting up the email address in GMail, you will have to check a verification email (which should arrive in your GMail inbox if the forwarder was setup correctly). Once verified, you will now be able to send mail from gmail.com, completely eliminating your previous email client.
There is just one last thing to do in order to fix outgoing emails when pressing the ‘Reply’ button. Go back into the “Accounts and Import” tab in GMail settings and make sure “Reply from the same address the message was sent to” is checked under the “When recieving email” setting.
You can now safely ditch your old email client and use gmail.com as your primary email tool. This has many advantages, the biggest is the amazing spam filter. However, if you’re a fan of the cloud, this is the way to go as opposed to a desktop client like Outlook or Thunderbird. Google also provides what is essentially unlimited email storage, meaning you’ll never have to delete an email…ever. Just rinse and repeat this process for all your email accounts, and you’ll have a nice hub for your messages online.
Tags: email
[...] In the previous post, we looked at ditching your current client for GMail and all the benefits it provides. Including, unlimited storage, web based, desktop based (w/ gears), among all of the other great features GMail provies. Now we’re going to take a quick look at extending this to a Blackberry. [...]