Importing mail into a gmail account

[Faan]

I have been using a gmail account for importing all my mail from different mail addresses to one gmail account. I now have a person working for me and decided to register another gmail address to import the business mail to the new gmail address. I validated the new email address and can see in the settings of the gmail account that it checks for new mail. Although I know that email is sent to the business nothing gets fetched and retrieved into the new gmail account. The question is why not?

[Martinco]

Faan,

Just remember that if your "home" computer has downloaded the email already, then gmail will not be able to find the emails because gmail checks your mail server for the emails and once downloaded to your computer, they are deleted from the server.
I do the following: Put a message rule on the home computer to forward the incoming emails to the gmail account.

[Faan]

What I did now is to insert a "forward" email address into cPanel and let us hope this works.
I sent an email from elsewhere and received it at the new one.

This however is not how I did it in the past.

[Martinco]

Your plan should work 100% !

[Faan]

It does work, but it is now a forwarded message and not an original.

[Dave A]

Forwarding mail like that can come with some surprising problems in this age of mail verification technology, and I would not recommend it if there are other options to solve the problem.

Faan, is your goal to have the mail to one email address be delivered to two different mail accounts then?
And if yes, why?

[Faan]

Dave thanks for the reply.
What I eventually did was to forward the mail from webmail in cPanel to my newly created gmail address.
Later on yesterday I started receiving mail directly as they were fetched by gmail from the server.

I have someone doing some admin for me and I did not want to get the person involved with all my other mail which has nothing to do with the business and that being the reason for the new gmail address.

I prefer using gmail as everything gets stored by Google. It suits me at this stage. Whether it is good in the long run one still has to see as everything lies now with Google.
But, thank you the problem is solved.

[irneb]

Just be wary of this. There are 2 reasons I can think of (off the top of my head) why making these automatic forwarding rules is not such a good idea:

1. If the 2nd address tries to reply to an email, they have to take note that they need to include the originator (and any other CC's) manually. Otherwise the email will only be replied to yourself - not the customer. And unfortunately the originator's address isn't always included in the forwarded message - even less the CCs.
2. Depending on the amount of email, you are setting yourself up to be blacklisted - forwarding emails (especially in bulk) is one of the things the blacklisters look out for. So you could quite easily find your emails being blocked as possible spam.

[Faan]

Just be wary of this. There are 2 reasons I can think of (off the top of my head) why making these automatic forwarding rules is not such a good idea:

1. If the 2nd address tries to reply to an email, they have to take note that they need to include the originator (and any other CC's) manually. Otherwise the email will only be replied to yourself - not the customer. And unfortunately the originator's address isn't always included in the forwarded message - even less the CCs.
2. Depending on the amount of email, you are setting yourself up to be blacklisted - forwarding emails (especially in bulk) is one of the things the blacklisters look out for. So you could quite easily find your emails being blocked as possible spam.

As to your point no 1 it was only a few emails that arrived as forwarded email and were handled successfully.

With reference to point 2 the forwarding was from my website to myself.

Thanks for the comments

[popayetwo]

Surely if you use imap instead of pop3 you will accomplish what you want to do? Imap doesn't delete the read mail from the server so you can access it from anywhere and any number of times. Or am I missing something here?

[irneb]

The issue is that Faan's got several "normal" mail accounts which he's combined into one gmail. Gmail has a feature to collect from many other accounts. That feature has an option to collect (using normal POP3 - not IMAP) the messages but leave them on the server. The issue with this is most servers (if not all) has a maximum post-box limit, and if your post-box reaches that limit all new messages gets bounced. So you need to clear the postboxes periodically. GMail's limit is somewhere in the order of 5-7 GB, while most others give you something like 5 - 20 MB: so it makes sense taking the messages off the other servers (to avoid bouncing - which would be extremely bad for business) and store them on gmail (for a type of any-where access).

That worked fine for Faan, but now that he's incorporated a 2nd gmail account for his employee - he wants those same messages to also be collected into that account. The only way this can happen is to set both gmails to collect but leave the messages on the original servers - i.e. creating the problem of bouncing again. So he's got his old gmail left as is (i.e. collect & delete) with the new gmail set to collect & leave. The problem here is if the old gmail account collects first, there are no messages left for the new gmail to collect. His solution was to not have the new gmail collect anything, rather just setup rules in the old to forward these messages on to the new one. And swapping the setting between the 2 gmail accounts may perhaps bychance work, but no-one can actually say how gmail orders those collections.

Another possible solution (though a bit more techy) would be to have both set to collect & leave. Then use a POP3 message manager program to delete the messages manually of each of the other servers. A bit too "manual" methinks. Anyhow, his current solution seems to work for him: i.e. his web page now sends the email to himself and his employee - so rather than getting gmail to work on a rule to forward, the website actually copies the employee on the same contact from a client.