For a long while I’ve been trying to amalgamate my email services into one account. I have a couple domains, all of which have email addresses with separate logins. It definitely becomes unwieldy to deal with so many accounts on an individual basis. It was a couple months ago that I discovered that you could actually manage multiple email accounts through your Gmail account. Using a couple different services on my Mac and PC I was able to setup the ultimate notification system to keep on top of my emails, as well as Twitter and Facebook.

Setting up forwarding to Gmail:

1. Under the settings in Gmail, click the Account tab and click “Add another email address”
2. Fill in the desired address you want to forward to your Gmail account
3. Gmail will then send a verification email to your external account. Simply click the enclosed link and Gmail will be ready to send messages from you@yourdomain.com
4. Find in your domain hosting or email settings(it’s different with every host) that deal with Email forwarding. Set your external account to forward to Gmail and you’re all set

Now the next obstacle you’ll find is if you use custom signatures. Gmail won’t quite do the job in that regard, as they currently only have the ability to handle one signature profile at a time. Since if you’re like me and have 4 addresses this can become an issue if you have professional emails and want to keep everything separate. Luckily there is a Firefox extension that handles this very issue. Gmail Signatures allows you to assign up to 4 different signature profiles per email address. For me I really only need 1 different profile per email address, so this handles things perfectly. Here’s a guide on how to get everything setup using Gmail Signatures.

Now all that’s left is to notify you when you get an email to Gmail. There are lots of ways of doing this, but I wanted to highlight what notification solutions I use for both Mac and PC.

For Mac:
I recently started using Growl, which is a pretty all purpose notification system that works with many programs available in OS X. All you need to do is download and install Growl, then install Google Notifier. I also use FMenu, which gives me Facebook updates through Growl, which is pretty handy. Using Twitter on the Mac is a little more complicated then just a simple install, but it can be done.

For PC:
I recently switched to using Digsby as my preferred messaging client on the PC. This application allows me to have similar notifications to that of Growl all in one application. Digsby allows me to use multiple messaging services and get notifications for new email, Facebook and Twitter.