Gmail now collects email from other accounts
Gmail has launched a new feature which allows users to collect email from up to five external accounts.
This represents a substantial leap forward for the functionality of the service, making it more easy easier to use Gmail as a global email solution.
According to the Gmail announcement 
, the new “MailFetcher” feature, which is accessible from the Accounts tab of Gmail’s preferences, offers options to leave copies of the retrieved messages on the remote server, to use SSL when retrieving the mail, to apply a label automatically to the collected messages and to archive the incoming email.
Full instructions for using the new feature can be found on another Gmail web page.
Obviously, this will put an end to the various complicated forwarding work-arounds that have been necessary in the past. It makes Gmail a much more attractive option as a total replacement for the traditional desktop client.
There’s only one hitch:
This feature is currently only enabled for a limited number of users. We’re working on making it more available soon.
It hasn’t appeared in my preferences yet, but it might be there in yours.
Tags: email, external accounts, GMAIL, Google, mailfetcher, new, pollingRelated posts
December 10th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
Hmm, “more easy”… I guess that grammar checker rumored to be in Leopard can’t come quickly enough. :)
December 10th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
Fair enough. I surrender.
December 10th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
Google’s continued advancement towards total world domination! :-)
December 11th, 2006 at 7:50 am
Color me confused.
I’m glad Google is doing all they can to make their online mail service the best there is, I thoroughly enjoy it actually, but why do they refuse IMAP? My Gmail inbox is a complete mess because everything is only organized as far as Mail.app is concerned.
The Reply button was nice, this is useful for those who use several Mail services, but all it is is POP3 on the web. I’m currently configuring my .Mac Mail account to give it a shot, surprise surprise it only pulls Mail from a POP3 server though.
*few minutes later*
My Test email went through, it works just fine I guess. And as I said, it’s just POP3 on the web. Funny thing is I predicted something like this some months ago in a Blog Post I deleted in favor of a whole new blog.
Sebastian
December 11th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
The one major feature missing, which would put an end to the major drawback of using the current system (sending an email from an account “added†to Gmail using the currently-available technique) of the email being labelled “xxx@ on behalf of yyyy@ which appears when it is opened in several mail clients (including Outlook).
I hope they will be deploying it for hosted, own domain Gmail accounts as well as the standard ones.