Strategies for Handling Multiple Email Addresses

Most people today have to deal with multiple email addresses/accounts. In fact if you get an email account from Yahoo or the other free providers they ask for a primary contact email address so that they can contact you.

For most people they will consist of a mix of Personal email addresses and business email addresses, and in turn this will consist of free accounts, ISP accounts and private domains.

So for illustration purposes lets take Joe. Joe has three email accounts/addresses.

There are several ways Joe can handle these addresses:

  1. Have all mail delivered to a single mailbox
  2. Have the mail delivered to separate mailboxes
  3. A combination .i.e. get personal mail delivered to a single mailbox and business email delivered to its own mailbox.

For the purpose of discussion we will look at option 3 has it illustrates the most possibilities.

Because there are three email addresses mail for each address will initially be delivered to three quite separate mailboxes on the respective email servers.

Once the email has been delivered to these mailboxes we can:

  1. Collect it using an email client or clients.
  2. Have it automatically forwarded to another mailbox.

Let's first consider option 1. Here we simply configure our email client (e.g. thunderbird) to access both mailboxes and retrieve the email. How we view this email depends on the protocol we use to access these mailboxes.

If we use POP3 then the mail ends up in a single inbox on the email client. If we use IMAP4 the email stays on the email server and the client displays the separate inboxes:

The screenshot below shows Thunderbird configured to access 3 mailboxes using IMAP4. Notice how the inboxes are kept separate:

thunderbird using imap4 3 mailboxes

Here is outlook express being used to access 2 separate mailboxes using POP3:

outlook express multiple maiboxes

You should notice that only one inbox is present even though the client is accesses multiple mailboxes/addresses. All mail appears in the Universal inbox which means that you will need to find another way of separating it (.e.g. message rules).

The above method of configuring a single email client to access multiple mailboxes is the most commonly used. The preferred access protocol IMAP4 with POP3 only being used out of necessity (i.e. the mail server only supports this protocol).

The other method is to forward the email. To do this we logon to the email account and, for example) have the Yahoo email forwarded to the joebloggs@BTInternet.com address.

All we then need do is to configure an email client to access the BTinternet.com mailbox, which will now contain email addresses to joebloggs@BTInternet.com and joebloggs@Yahoo.com (see email forwarding).

Forwarding isn't the preferred method and only recommended to use it as a temporary solution.

Now we have discussed accesses the personal email addresses the last step is to get email for the business account and keep it separate.

The easiest way of doing this is to use IMAP4 as the access protocol and configure the client to access the business mailbox. Imap4 keeps the mailboxes separate anyway but allows us to see all of them in the same window making it very convenient.

If we need to access using POP3 then we can either:

  • Use another Identity to access the business mailbox or
  • Use another email client i.e. use outlook express to access the personal mailboxes and Thunderbird to access the business ones.

See Outlook Express Identities and Using Multiple Email Clients for more details.

Related articles and resources: