E-mail addresses & Gmail

Black Ice

I love Gmail. it's awesome. I use it for recreational purposes primarily, but I want to change that.

I've opened up a second account and figured out how to send e-mail from my old address.. but what I'd really love to do is forward it. It's a Mindspring account, and I use Outlook to manage it. Is there a way I can get all mail sent to that address to go to this new Gmail account?

All I can figure out is how to send from my Gmail account, not to it. Is this even possible? I have a butt-load of college e-mails, spam e-mails, etc. sent to the Mindspring account. I really need to start looking at it more, but it's so much to deal with when I get 20 e-mails a day and half of it is junk mail that gets past the spam filter.

tl;dr: I have never received a single Gmail spam message, and I love the labels feature, so I'd like to start utilizing both of these features in my old e-mail account. Is there a way to do that?

Kyanilis

Does your mindspring account have a webmail feature? If it does go into it and see if there is a settings area where you can have it forward mail to your gmail account. It may or may not have this option, if it does, bam problem solved, if it doesn't it could be trickier.

Black Ice

It does, it's going to take a few hours to find out how to access it though. I guess I'll update the situation in a bit. But - I'm surprised that Outlook wouldn't have this feature, yet webmail might?

whuppins

Your post is a little confusing, but it sounds like you're asking if you can use Gmail as a POP client to handle your existing Mindspring account.

The answer is no, you can't. But almost every e-mail sevice provider in the world provides a forwarding service. Check their website and see if you can get Mindspring to copy or forward your mail to the new Gmail address.

Black Ice

How can I make it more specific? Sorry

I'm trying to figure out how to use a forwarding service. I can access my e-mail accounts using Earthlink's webmail... but it's really weird. I have hundreds of messages in Outlook, yet when I log in to my e-mail accounts on Earthlink's webmail system, I see nothing. No messages, nothing in the inbox. I'm not sure if that's the best way to go about forwarding them or not, as it seems to just not be able to read my mail, despite being able to log in to my account.

I did a Google search for how to forward a pop e-mail and I'm not getting anything that solid.. still searching, though.

Ruckus

Black Ice wrote: »

It does, it's going to take a few hours to find out how to access it though. I guess I'll update the situation in a bit. But - I'm surprised that Outlook wouldn't have this feature, yet webmail might?

You can use rules to forward your mail if you want, but you'll need to have outlook running 24/7 for the rules to forward your mail.

Permanent server side mail forwarding is much more efficient way to do it.

[edit]If the mailman drops off your mail daily from the post office, and it piles up at home, are you surprised when you go down to the post office and there's no mail waiting?

whuppins

Yeah, as Ruckus mentioned, I was referring to server-side forwarding, i.e. calling up Mindspring and telling them to redirect incoming messages to whatever@gmail.com. Your Google search is fruitless because the way to set up forwarding has nothing to do with clients (Outlook, webmail, etc.) and varies from ISP to ISP. Go to Mindspring's site and look for info on how to get them to start forwarding your mail.

Edit: There may be some confusion as to how POP mail works. Outlook is just a client that is used to download messages from a mail server. It seems like you're wanting to use Outlook to download messages, then automatically forward them to your Gmail address. You can probably get it to do this if you write your rules correctly and keep Outlook running 24/7, but a much simpler way is to just cut out the middle man (Outlook) and have Mindspring forward messages directly to Gmail.

Basically this was just a wordier version of Ruckus' post. TL;DR: You can use Outlook to forward mail, but it's a really wonky way of doing it. Contact Mindspring and find out how you can specify a forwarding address.

Yar

Yeah I think the Webmail option is your best bet. Your goal is to log into your Mindspring Webmail and find a setting just like the one in gmail that lets you forward all incoming mail to another address.

Reiten

It sounds to me like you have Outlook set to remove emails from the server after you download them. That's why you aren't seeing anything when you look at the webmail version of your account.

Yar

That shouldn't matter, anyway.

Ruckus

Yar wrote: »

That shouldn't matter, anyway.

Not for forwarding, but it explains why he's confused regarding the lack of mail in the webmail interface

whuppins

OK, so I guess Mindspring was absorbed into Earthlink a while back? Here's the Earthlink support page with instructions on how to set up e-mail forwarding: http://kb.earthlink.net/case.asp?article=27726

Hope this helps.

pacbowl

Your post is a little confusing, but it sounds like you're asking if you can use Gmail as a POP client to handle your existing Mindspring account.

The answer is no, you can't.

Actually, you can. In the Account settings of gmail you can set it to pop into another email server (Earthlink, Comcast, etc...) and retrieve messages.

seasleepy

Yeah, what pacbowl said, but I don't think it's available for everyone yet. Gmail for whatever reason only calls it "Mail Fetcher" on their help pages.

If you don't have the mail fetcher options in Gmail yet though and you want it now, you can set up the server-side forwarding in Mindspring instead.

whuppins

I'll be a son of a bitch, I never saw that feature and I've been wanting to use Gmail to fetch my POP mail forever. Just log into Gmail and click Settings > Accounts > Add Another Mail Account.