You know… I never really appreciated Gmail until I got stuck in Pakistan. I had a server hosted in Singapore data center. Access to emails were always at a blazingly fast speed… that was until I got stuck in Pakistan for a couple of months (for business reasons)….
Then, it got really irritating. Due to the poor network problems, checking email became a chore. It was like lottery. 50% of the time you get your mails, the other 50% of the time… bad luck bro… .and so it remained until I discovered that Gmail allowed you to interface to POP accounts…
Basically Gmail can be used to both receive and send your emails! It can be the web-based front end to your traditional POP email accounts!
Image of Gmail showing that it has been successfully integrated to the company’s POP server
Procedure to set up Gmail to connect to your POP accounts
Step 1: Click on Settings at the top right.
Step 2: Click on Add another email address at the Send Mail as row (1st row)
Step 3: Click on Add another email address at the Receiving Mail as row (3rd row)
What if you’re using IMAP instead of a POP mail server?
GMail doesnt seem to have a “Download mail using IMAP” function. I hacked around it by adding my gmail account as an alias for my linux user account account.
Wah brother so cheam. Its true that Gmail doesn’t have a download using IMAP…
Hmm… but how does adding an alias work? Ooops.. just shows my limited knowledge on Linux…
Well frankly, I rely on Jiang Hao on almost all my Linux set up.
Sigh… too much to learn … and just too little time…
Bro, its rather straight-forward.
Simply edit /etc/alias and add a line:
james james, james@gmail.com
then run newalises command once.
Henceforth, all emails directed to james@xtremax.com will be forwarded to james@gmail.com as well. You can add as many aliases as you want. It works for internal users as well, eg. adding edward as an alias for james will have your emails forwarded to edward@xtremax.com.