I have tried Zymbra and Windows live mail as a desktop solution to aggregate my email accounts across Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL etc. With both these solutions or similar desktop email aggregators i found that they eat up your disk space and most of the time there will be weird error messages which does not make any sense to end users. On top of it, when accessing your email accounts on iPhone or other mobile devices you still have to go through setting up these multiple email accounts one by one and then accessing these accounts one by one separately. How convenient is this? First loose your disk space and then loose your sleep on those weird errors and finally go through the pain of accessing your email accounts one by one on your iPhone or other mobile device. So here is the solution:
- Login to Gmail (by Google) and select “Mail Settings” from the top right hand corner and then click “Accounts and Import”.
- For email accounts that do not allow free email sync using POP3 use the “Import Mail and Contacts” section. For email accounts that allow free sync using POP3 use “Check Mail using POP3” section. Here is a screenshot:
- Once you are done with this let Gmail sync and import ALL accounts. It may take couple hours for Gmail to sync all emails if you have couple thousand emails.
- Go to your Gmail Inbox and select All. Then you will see a link which says “Select All <number> messages. Click on that link. Then click the More option on the top and select “Mark as Read”. You unread email count goes down to 0 now.
- On your iPhone setup just one Gmail account that you just configured. Now when you access your emails on your iphone or your desktop (using a browser) you can see messages from ALL email accounts at ONE single place!!