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.