Access Other POP3 Mailboxes Using Gmail

You can access your Gmail mailbox using the standard webmail (web browser) or via an desktop based email client like Outlook Express using either the POP3 or IMAP4 protocols.

However Gmail can also be used as an email client and can be used to access POP3/IMAP4 mailboxes.

This means that you can:

  • Use Gmail to access a mailbox that doesn't support webmail access. Useful if you require remote access (e.g. when on holiday)
  • Use Gmail to access multiple accounts and consolidate them into a single mailbox.

To illustrate imagine you have your standard email mailbox with a Gmail address of me@gmail.com.

You can logon to this account and under the settings section you can configure it to check other email mailboxes.

Let's assume you have an account me@mydomain.com which you can access using either POP3 or Imap4, but not using Webmail (i.e. a browser).

You can configure your Google Gmail account to access this mailbox and place the email into your Gmail mailbox. Not only that but Gmail shows the email is from a different account by assigning it a label using the email address.

Here is a screenshot of my gmail account set up to retrieve email from the account xx@onexxx.com (note email address not shown in full due to spam)

Here is how it is setup under accounts and Import. Notice it tells you the last time the mailbox was checked.

To configure the address for the pop3 server/username/password as well as other settings click the edit info button in the "check mail using POP3" box. You can see what options are available in the screenshot below

Other Setup Notes:

It is not possible to configure how often Gmail will check the mailbox but it is possible to manually check the mail using the check now button.

You need to configure the sending SMTP server to use when you reply to a message sent to that mailbox. Use the Gmail smtp server as it is easy to setup. You can access this setting using the edit info button in the right hand side of the "send mail as" box.

 

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