Sync Email Without Having to Change Your Email Address using Gmail

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you how to sync your email on your phone, tablet, and computer — even if you don’t want to change your email address. 

Most people have their emails all synced up between devices since most providers offer IMAP mail service now. But some still only offer POP3 and that means that when you read and delete a message on your phone, you still have to go and do the same thing on your computer. And again if you have a third device like a tablet.  It’s hard to keep up with it and you end up with out of control inboxes and no idea what has been dealt with and what hasn’t. In addition, if you save an email on one device, you can only retrieve if from that device. It’s annoying. The problem is that a lot of people have had their email address for 10+ years. It would be a big pain in the rear to have to change their email address with all of their contacts and vendors.  So, here is a solution to for you to switch over to all of the benefits of IMAP email without having to change your email address. 

Okay — first let me do a quick explainer on IMAP vs. POP3. These are both email protocols, which is just a set of rules that the mail server uses. The main difference between IMAP and POP3 for our purposes is how they deliver mail from the server. 

POP3 receives your mail and then, depending how many devices are asking for it, will send it out and then delete it from its server. Now you have a copy on your devices, but the devices aren’t talking to each other and since there is no central storage, when you delete a message on one device, you have to repeat that process on all of your other devices. 

IMAP doesn’t deliver your mail so much as it mirrors an entire copy of your mailbox to each of your devices. This includes your inbox, but also includes all of your sent files, trash, and saved folders. Anytime you make a change in one place, like delete a message, it communicates back with the central server and then makes that change on all your devices. 

I suppose there *might* be a situation where POP3 is better, but if you have more than one device where you access your mail, you HAVE to use IMAP.   Now, here is the problem. Not all providers offer IMAP —particularly regional service providers who don’t have the most up-to-date service. So, what if you have been using the same email address for 10 years, don’t want to change it, but are sick and tired of deleting emails from multiple devices?  I have a solution for you.  I set this up for my mom, my mother in law, and my sister in law, who all faced that annoying problem.  Here it is in a nutshell — you are going to set up a new Gmail account (don’t worry, you don’t have to change your email address), have your current email provider forward everything to your Gmail address, and then change the settings in your phone and other devices to pull from the new gmail account. Okay — let’s walk through each step. 

1 - Set up Gmail address

First you will need to create a Gmail account with Google if you don’t already have one at mail.google.com.  Choose “create an account” and then fill in all of this information.  Even though you aren’t going to actively use this email address, try to pick a username you like. After all, you might decide to switch email addresses at some point and this would be a really easy transition. Make sure you record your new email address and your password somewhere. 

2 - Forward all mail to this Gmail address

Now — you need to log into your web account for your current email address. Almost every provider gives you a way to forward all mail to a new account.  Because each provider has a different series of steps, I can’t walk you through your specific process.  But I can walk through it using a Comcast or Xfinity mail account — it should be pretty similar for you.  

• Find the webmail address for your email service.  If you don’t know if, you should be able to do a quick Google search with the name of your email provider and webmail
• Log in using your credentials.  
• Navigate to email. 
• Look for email settings.  In this case, it’s this gears symbol in the upper right hand corner. 
• Go to Auto Forward.  Now enable it by checking the box and put your new Gmail address in the field for the email destination. You do not want to save a copy of forwarded emails unless you want a mailbox full of duplicates. 
• If you are having problems doing this, call customer service for your email provider and ask them to show you how to Auto Forward.

3 - Add Gmail account to all portable devices

Now we are on to the third step.  You need to change all of your devices to pull email from the new Gmail address rather than your (in my case) Comcast address.  Here’s how you add a Gmail account on an iPhone:

• Go to Settings, then Accounts and Passwords
• Choose to Add an Account and pick Google
• Now enter your new Gmail address and password 
• It’ll bring you to a screen where you can choose which information to share with your device.  For this purpose, just choose Mail and turn the others off and hit save. 

4 - Access Gmail account from Computer

For your computer, many people still use Microsoft’s Outlook software for email.  You can certainly add this Gmail address to Outlook, but — and hear me out here — if you have regular access to the Internet, I would suggest using Gmail’s webmail service from a browser.  

• Instead of a piece of software, it is just a website: mail.google.com. It has much of the functionality of Outlook, but you don’t have to deal with all of the cumbersome issues that come with another piece of software like delays and syncing issues. PLUS, you don’t have do anything to add this account, you just have to log in to the Gmail website. 
• If you are used to clicking on the Outlook icon to access your email, then make a shortcut icon that takes you directly to Gmail’s website.  Do that by copying the URL of the Gmail inbox, going to your desktop, right clicking, choosing New and Shortcut, and pasting in the website location. I am just going to name it Email.  Done!
• Also, add Gmail to the shortcut bar on your browser.  Here’s how you do it in Chrome: right click anywhere on the shortcut bar, choose Add Page, name it Email and paste the URL and there it is!

5 - Save old mail and delete old account

• Before you delete your old account from your phone, you may have a bunch of emails in your inbox or in saved folders that you want to keep.  Remember any mail that you receive from now on will be forwarded to your gmail account, but anything you received before will not. There are a couple of options here:
• Migrate - some email providers have a process that helps you migrate your email to another provider.  Just a word of warning, unless you are a techie, this is probably not a great option. I’ve done this process for lots of people and have never been able to get the migration process to work properly.  So, let’s talk about the next option . . .
• Forward individually - this is a huge pain in the butt because it involves forwarding each individual email to your new Gmail address.  It depends on how many you want to keep and how much energy you have. Or you could always,
• Archive - what I mean by that is that you can just leave those old emails in your old account. You can always log into webmail for your old account to retrieve them if you ever need to.  Most people do a combination of the last two options: they forward the most important individual emails and then leave the rest in their old account.  Most of the time, they never even need to access them. 

Once you have figured out what to do with old emails, delete your old email account off of your portable devices like phones and tablets and potentially off of your computer if you are not using it to archive email. 

Now, every email that comes in addressed to your old email address will hit that server and be automatically forwarded the new Gmail account. There is usually only a couple of second delay.  The Gmail account becomes your new repository for mail.  You can create folders to save emails from your computer (you can do it on your phone too, but it is a little more complicated) and all of your folders including your inbox will be mirrored across all of your devices. Delete a message on your phone and it disappears from your computer.  File a message on your iPad and retrieve it from that saved folder on your phone.  You continue to use your current email address, no one ever needs to know or ever use your Gmail address — it is really just a pass through address.  

Let me know how this goes for you!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!