Manage all your email with Gmail

You can use one Gmail Account to manage all your email. I use Google Gmail for all my websites, charter.com, my work email, and even my Yahoo and AOL.

Since everything is going to Gmail I do not need real mailboxes for any of my websites. I just setup the domains webmail system to forward all email to my gmail address. There are two ways to do this.

• One way is to have all mail sent to yourname@yourdomain.com forwarded to youraddress@gmail.com
• The other way is to setup a catch all account and forward all email sent to anyname @yourdomain.com to youraddress@gmail.com

So the people you reply to do not need to understand whats going on (it could be confusing to them) google allows you to select how to handle replies and how to handle new outgoing emails. You get to select what email address is the default for new outgoing emails, and what email address to use for replies.

I have my email set to reply using the same account the email was sent to, and I've picked the default email account for new outgoing emails. You still have the ability to pick a different account before you send an email.

For mailboxes you already have like Charter, work, Yahoo, and AOL you can setup gmail to download those mailboxes every 30 minutes. You get to pick if you want the mail left in the mailbox or deleted when you download it. For my charter email I have it deleted as its downloaded. For my work email I have it left in the inbox.

To help reduce the time I spend in my email, I use gmail filters. I have filters for my brother, daughter, wife, bank, and all the other people and places that I often get email from. These filters automatically label my emails as they come in. Some of the filters like the one for my work email is set to automatically labeled and archived the messages. I do this with my work email because I read my work email using the stock android email client on my phone but I like gmail as a backup archive for my work email. I have other filters setup to archive and delete the emails I never normally read but are not spam, and I have filters setup just to automatically label emails from places like Staples, Monster, and my Bank so I can quickly archive them after I see them. Archiving saves your email so you can read it again later and gets them out of your inbox. labeling emails puts them in folders to make them easier to find later. I also use my android and gmail inbox's as my to-do lists, so I like to keep them clean.

Because of gmail I can read all my email from my ipad, my android, or any web browser and all the devices I use stay in sync. So I don't have to figure out what I've already seen.

Since I switched to Gmail around 2006, my email has gone from being a real "pain in the butt" to a feeling like "The Maytag Repairman" now I often feel like I have nothing to do cause I've already seen it, and taken care of it.

Update June 2015

Still loving my gmail and wonder why anyone would use anything else.