E-mail setup

A frenzied user thumbs through multiple browser tabs frantically looking through an important e-mail. About 20 minutes go by and the user finally stumbles upon the lost e-mail; happy and elated the user thinks to them self that it would have been a whole lot easier if they had, had all their e-mail in one spot.

So I am guessing that most people who are good and capable Internet users and are not in there forties have multiple e-mail accounts. I know I do and I am guessing that you, the reader, do as well.

I remember in the early days of the Internet there was only a few free e-mail accounts. For me my first e-mail account was and account I made on Yahoo, and that was fine for the time being.

With that Yahoo account I could check my e-mail, play games on their website and create webpages on Geocities. That was all I really needed for an account, until Google came along.

Google offered a few services that Yahoo didn't or if they did they tended to be more polished with a better design. So naturally I had to create a new Gmail account to take advantage of these services.

Finally comes college and I have yet another new e-mail account in the form of my Cmich account.

What do I need three accounts for? Well honestly I only need them to access services from each of the companies/universities. This of course makes checking my e-mail time consuming.

So basically the whole point is that you can organize your e-mail into one place and it is actually a lot easier then you may think.

I am basically going to describe to you how to get all your e-mail in one place without ever having to fire up your browser.

The first part of all this is to get your cmich e-mail forwarded to another server; I am going to use Gmail because they offer a lot of room for e-mail storage.

Now you cannot attach your Cmich e-mail to a POP3 service, which is pretty crummy to say the least but what you can do is have your e-mails forwarded to another address.

So what you are going to do is go to https://myaccount.cmich.edu/home.asp and log in. On the left hand side there will be a box with a bunch of stuff and what you want to do is click E-mail forwarding.

From here it is pretty self-explanatory, I choose when I forward my mail to not save a draft in my Cmich account because I don't want a whole lot of back up mail.

Next if you did this using a Gmail account you are going to go to their website and log in to your Gmail.

In the right hand corner of the screen you should see the name of your e-mail account and to the right of that you should see the words settings. Click on settings and then you will see a screen with a bunch of tabs you want to click on the accounts and import tab.

So now you have a few options you can either set up a different e-mail to be forwarded to your gmail account or to be set up as a POP3.

Basically if you use POP3 you are having your e-mail retrieved and kept in a separate folder. This makes it a bit easier to discern which account the e-mail is being sent to.

If you have Yahoo then you will find that they are a little bit difficult to work with, apparently you have to subscribe to a premium service. So if you are using a free Yahoo account then just have it forwarded to Gmail.

So now we are at are final step and that is getting the e-mail straight to the desktop.

I am going to tell you how to use Thunderbird, which is a service similar to Microsoft Outlook. Thunderbird is distributed by Mozilla, which also distributes the Firefox browser.

I am choosing to use Thunderbird because of its simplicity and its ability to add apps to the service.

So anyways go to the Mozilla website and you are going to click the tab called products. From there you are going to click on Thunderbird, which will take you to a page describing the product. Click the download button and once that is done launch the service.

The first time through you will be given an option to import all your data from Microsoft Outlook, choose to ignore all this stuff and instead click on the last option.

You will be prompted to set up a POP3, so use your Gmail or any other e-mail you have used to have your messages forwarded to, but not Yahoo because it doesn't work.

Once you put in your e-mail and password in you should now be able to view all your messages in one place.

You can add another POP3 by clicking the File tab and going to new and then e-mail account.