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Tuesdays are extremely busy for me, so instead of posting a long article, I am just going to share a quick productivity tip on managing your email.

There are many distractions that online entrepreneurs face multiple times every day. Checking stats, reading blogs, reading forums, and managing emails can really get in the way of productive tasks. While it is hard to eliminate all of these things, especially email, there are ways to optimize them. In this quick post, I am going to show you how I manage over 20 email addresses from within one Gmail account.

One Central Location

I used to use desktop applications like Thunderbird or Outlook for my emailing needs, but this became a huge problem when I started to add more devices to my life. Desktop computers, laptop computers, media center computers, public computers, pocket computers, and even cell phones all have the ability to manage email. But managing it between them is a huge pain. I find it much easier to store everything in one online account that can be accessed from anywhere.

Forwarding All Email

The first step to managing your email through Gmail is to set all of your other email address to forward messages to it. My Gmail address is “derekbeau -[at]- gmail -[dot]- com” so I simply told every other email address that I own (associated with my domain names) to forward here. I also told them to delete email after forwarding so that I don’t ever have to manage those accounts.

Now all your emails will go directly into your Gmail account instead of in your separate mailboxes. Each of them will also retain their original header information so you can see which address they were originally sent to.

Sending Mail Through Gmail

The next step is to prove that you are the owner of each email address so that Google will let you send mail from them. To do this, simply click on the “Settings” link in the top right corner of your Gmail account, then click the “Accounts” tab and “Add another email address”. This will open a new window where you will enter the “Name” on the email address (you can use your own name, a nick name, or even a pseudonym) and the actual email address. Click “Next Step” and then click “Send Verification.”

Now, since you already set up mail forwarding, this verification email should appear right in your Gmail account as new mail. Open it up and click the verification link to prove that you have rights to that account. That’s all there is to it.

Working With Multiple Email Addresses

From within that “Settings > Account” tab, you should make sure to select your default email address (used for composing new mail) and to check the option to “Reply from the same address the message was sent to”. This will make it so that you never have to worry about changing the from field when you send emails (unless you want to) because Gmail will fill in the proper defaults automatically.

If you do want to change the from address of a new email or a reply, simply choose one of your many accounts from the available drop down menu.

Automatic New Mail Notifications

One downside of using a web based email client is that you have to log in to check for new mail. Fortunately, there are plenty of little applications that interface with Gmail to notify you of any new mail.

My favorite is the Gmail Manager extension for FireFox. Simply add your main account in the options/settings and it will always show you how many unread messages you have in your Gmail account (and across all of your other managed addresses) right in the corner of your browser. To access the inbox, just click on the icon and it will take you right where you want to be… it will even do the logging in for you.

How Are You Managing Emails?

This is by far the best method I can think of for managing my emails. It saves me so much time by not having to log into multiple accounts or to manage email files on local computers. No matter what I do on my computer, or which computer I am using, I always have access to every one of my emails. So I have to ask, are you managing your emails in this same manner or do you have a different system that works better for you?

For more information on using Gmail, take a look at the extensive, official help center.