Manage several email If you have just 2 to 3 email addresses, then this article may not be for you. If you have several gmail accounts, yahoo and your own domain name email, then this article will show you how to manage multiple email address without logging in and out.

Why do you need so many email addresses? Well, there are many reasons. You have a work email, 2 personal email accounts for example on Yahoo, Hotmail or Google, then if you have a website, you probably have another 1 or 2 email accounts.

I know some entrepreneurs who are just starting out and want to give the impression of a larger organization, usually sets up a few accounts as well for sales, support, and accounts, eventhough it is just one person.

For me, I have several blogs and each have a different email addresses. This is to keep thing separate and for consistency. I suspect many people have at least 2 to 3 personal email addresses just for backup or when you want to use certain features like online photo albums, Google + etc.

The question then is:-

  1. How do you handle multiple email addresses and messages in one place?
  2. How do you ensure you don’t mix up the emails accidentally?

There are a few ways you have manage multiple email addresses. We will just look at 2 options.

Option number 1

Import the different emails into a gmail account and access your email within gmail. With this method, you can read and reply all your main within gmail. Google makes it easy to import your other emails too. All you have to do is to add your email address and your password. They will then send a link to that email address to verify that you are the actual owner of that email address.

I used this method initially. However, this method has its downsides.

With too many email account, I accidentally replied an email that come in through one site eg [email protected] with one from another site james@site-bcom. Oops. No harm done but I didn’t want that to happen again.

What if you sent the email using your work email by accident? Or vice versa?

After considering what I wanted to accomplish, access email in one place and have no accidental mix up, the solution is to use an email client.

Option number 2

The solution is Thunderbird, a free email client. Besides not having to log in an out of web based emails, there is also of overlooked emails. This will happen if you channel all you email account into Gmail, especially with certain email addresses that I don’t access regularly but still need to respond to when they come.

In Thunderbird, each email account is separated by different folders. When you reply to an email, it will use the same email address the mail arrived in. You don’t need to select the email account to reply to like in Gmail. You can also have individual email signature for different email address. That way, there is minimal chance of replying an email with the wrong email address.

Before using Thunderbird, I did try OperaMail. Opera is a web browser like Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. Since I have Opera installed, I thought why not. Having used it for several weeks, I find that it had intermittent problems retrieving my emails.

I finally went back to Thunderbird. It was something I’ve used in the past so I’m familiar with it. Getting several emails configured to Thunderbird is easy as well. Configuring Gmail accounts, accounts from my hosting company and others was much easier compared to configuring OperaMail.

Configure Thunderbird

To configure Thunderbird is rather easy. All you have to do is click on “Create A New Account”. Then click on “skip this and use my existing email”

Configure Thunderbird Email

This takes you to the next screen where all you need to do was to key in your name, the email address and password. Thunderbird will figured out the rest (for me anyway for several email addresses). It should be that way for you too.

Configure Thunderbird Email 2

No need to manually configure SSL, port number etc. Even my office email address, which for the life of me, cannot figure out why they still suggest to use POP as compared to IMAP, Thunderbird manage to “suck in” all the necessary information and I now have IMAP. No longer to I need to log into the web version just to delete old emails. Nice!

You can then configure each account to your liking for finer control. For example, having a different signature text for each email account. Your signature text is the little bit of text that is included every time your send emails.

Manage Multiple Email Address

Every time you reply, then you won’t make the mistake of using the wrong email account.

Security

Now that you can access all your email address from one place, you need to think about security. You don’t want just anyone to see all your emails with just a single click, right?

You can set a master password in Thunderbird. That way, every time you open Thunderbird, it ask for a password.

Update

Sometime ago, my webhost moved their server. There were changes to their email server settings. I had to manually set the setting but it wasn’t difficult. It is just something you have to be aware of if Thunderbird could not automatically configure the email account.

You would be able to get the correct information from your webhost.

If you find it difficult to manage multiple email addresses, then I suggest you consider Thunderbird. It is free. You can download it here.

If you use a different software or have a different method, feel free to let me know in the comments.