Email set – up for office or private use

The bigest issues we normally face with emails, is to keep rubbish and spam out of it as well as to have a back up of mails that we might need in the future. Computer breakdowns, installing of a new operating system or adding your mails to the phone will always require a lengthy re-install with back-ups and restores, if we only have one pop mail account installed on a single computer. It would be better, if we could have an easy and simple system, that allows us to quickly re-install or move our accounts to any computer or phone, without having to back up everything to a mobile media and re-install everything again when needed. On top of it, it should be managable for any normal person to do.

As I am moving jobs every few years, my office addresses are changing frequently and so do the computers or hand phones that I use. I want to be able to quickly re-install my mails on a new system and keep a back-up, just in case I need to look up something in the future. It also helps to feel secure in case one looses access to a computer hard disk or any tragedy that might happens to a computer. To take care of all this, I came up with the following set-up for all my mails.

 

After many trial and error, this set-up suits me best now.

1. You need to know the log in and mail settings of your personal and/or office email (Mail server name, ports, email, password etc.)
2. Create a google account that looks similar to your official address (e.g. john_doe@workalot.com / john_doe@gmail.com), this is important as sometimes you have to use the gmail address, so you or a recipient will not get too confused when they see sometimes a gmail address of you. They still can make the connection to the original account.
3. After you registered your gmail account, go to setting on your gmail account website, click on the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab and enable “IMAP”.
4. Move to the “Filters and blocked addresses” tab and see “check mail from other account” and add your official details (your private or office email account), set it to delete email after download, go to “send mail as” and add your official email as well. With this setting, your official email is shown, even there is sometimes a gmail address as well.
5. Create a “IMAP” account in the email client of your choice, instruct it to download emails from the google account you have just created. You can find help how to do it on “Configure your email client (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, iPhone), just on the bottom of your google web-mail account in the forwarding POP/IMAP tab.

What is the purpose of this set-up

Don’t worry, it is not as complicated as you might think when you read it, just do step by step as explained above and you will be ready in a jiffy. There are some great advantages to have when done:

1. Spam: Google has one of the best spam filter there is and will take out 99% of your spam mails. Once in a while you have to check it on the web-mail account to make sure nothing goes into spam that shouldn’t .
2. Viruses: Google has a fantastic antivirus filter. It will not download suspicious emails from your official mail server but inform you by email that there is a mail with a suspicious or virus as attachment which it did not fetch. Then you just need to delete the original email from your office or private server once in a while.
3. Backup: As it is a IMAP account, it does not matter how many times you change your email software on your computer or hand phone, it will just download it again when you set-up the new email client.
4. You hand out your official email address with your business card and reply to address but receive everything through your gmail account, which works as spam and virus filter.
5. Google will check your official accounts on regular basis but be aware, there is a delay of fetching, depending on how busy your account is. If you want to know immediately what is coming in, just check the important account directly. There are so many email programs out there for HP and Computer. I have the HP original email program checking my office account. As soon as it pings, I can ask the computer to download it into the Gmail.
6. Your Gmail account becomes your Archive for your emails. 15GB free is quite a sufficient amount for a regular email account. Office and private accounts normally never offer that much of storage. If it happens that you have to keep a huge amount of data and you are getting close to the 15GM, just register a new gmail account and link your official email to it again. Then, the old email account becomes your archive.

This set-up served me well over time and is not that complicated when you get used to it. Also, Google comes always out with new ways to make your email handling easier.

I hope these tips will help you to organize your different email accounts easier and keep you safe from all the viruses, malware and spam that go around.