Organizing and Managing All Your Mail With Gmail (Part 1)- Bloggy Tutorials #1

Welcome to the first tutorial in the series called Bloggy Tutorials. In this series, I aim to give tutorials on anything that is related to blogging. Enjoy!

P.S: In this series of a series on Gmail, I’ll show you how to make yourself a more organized emailer, something that is very important for organized bloggers. Enjoy the parts! I’ll update you with new parts in this tutorial as they come!:D

Why Gmail?

Gmail is a very versatile and reliable email system. After all, it’s by Google And with constantly increasing, albeit slowly, disk space, who needs other email services?

Gmail is fast, simple and easy to use, which propels it to the top for email services.

Anyways, Gmail is very powerful and can be easily beautifully adapted to your needs. In this first article, I describe one of the most powerful functions of Gmail: managing all your accounts in one place.

Why Would You Do That?

Yeah, why would you want to use manage all your accounts in one place?

Suppose you have multiple e-mail accounts, which is probably the norm nowadays. You would normally open up a couple of offline email managers, and another two online ones. You’ve got a complex system worked out to manage your email, but it works for you. But probably, that complex system hangs on a slim thread. Cut that and poof! Your system is history. One little very possible glitch, and poof.

What I mean is that your email takes up a majority of your time. Running to that account and then to this one. Replying from there and here. It’s a mess.

An effective e-mail system works like clockwork, and takes as little time as possible. And having multiple e-mail accounts working within a system that hangs on a thread is not an effective e-mail system.

In this series of tutorials, I aim to teach you just that

What Are the Benefits?

You save loads. Instead of running multiple e-mail systems, banging your head on the wall waiting for a faulty e-mail program to load, you can easily, effectively do all of it from one place. You don’t have to wait hours on end(Gmail is very fast) or start to bang your head on the wall (Gmail is very user-friendly). Nor do you have to worry about hack attacks (Gmail is very secure. Think https://). Nor do you have to worry about spam(Google’s vast knowledge of spam is behind Gmail).

Moreover, if you’re not a big-time emailer and don’t receive tons of email, it is very wise to have a flexible system already in place, so that when the flood comes in, you are prepared. If you really are a big time emailer, and don’t use a good and effective system, my friend, you need an email check!

All these things help save time. And time is money.

Going About It

Alright. You’ve decided that you want to embrace Gmail, and to manage all you accounts with it. But you don’t know how. Here’s where this tutorial comes in. This tutorial will teach you how to set up your e-mail accounts with Gmail.

Step 1: Make a Plan

As with everything else, you should make a plan of what to do. This might be a small thing to plan for, but it will save you trouble later on. How? Read on.

Keeping People’s Trust Intact

Whenever we send e-mail to anyone, we expect we’ll get a reply from the same address, right? But when we get a reply from a different address, what do we think? We normally think that we’re being scammed or phished or something, right? It’s natural. Getting the unexpected sets off the alarm bells in everyone.

You don’t want this to happen with your clients too. You want to make sure that people who email you get a reply from the same address. So, your first and foremost concern is to set up your email accounts in such a way that senders get a reply from the same address. This will save your reputation.

Organize Your Email

Naturally, with all the diverse e-mail coming in, you will want and need to have a good system of organization to put in place some law and order for the emails

So that is your second goal. To organize your email in an orderly and effective fashion.(We’ll learn more about that in the next lesson)

Step 2. Action Time

So, let’s start.

Add the Accounts

In your Gmail account, click on Settings –> Accounts. Scroll down to where it says ‘Get mail from other accounts’:

Click on ‘Add another mail account’

Fill up the the forms. You’ll be asked to confirm your email. Do that. And you’re done:

Note: Be sure to check the ‘Label incoming messages’. That will allow you to differentiate messages from the different accounts. If you have several accounts in Gmail, this will help immensely

Set Default Account

Scroll up the same page, and you’ll see the ‘Send mail as’ option. Choose which email identity you want to send all your mail as. You can change this for specific posts(on the compose page). If you are concerned about your privacy, and do not want to give out your personal Gmail address, choose one of the other options:

And you’re done…

…atleast for now. Wait for the next part of this tutorial, in which I explain how to use Labels to your advantage. Stay tuned, and the best way to do that would be to subscribe to the RSS Feed