In this video, I’ll show you how to sync your email on your phone, tablet, and computer using IMAP — even if you don’t want to change your email address.
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**** A truncated transcript follows. A full transcript can be found at www.marblejar.net. ****
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.
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. . .
**** Read a full transcript at www.marblejar.net. ****
