Unified E-Mail for Fort Collins Business?

In today’s tutorial we’re going to take you through the process of setting up your G-Mail account to manage all of your personal and company e-mail accounts through one unified and versatile interface. When your accounts are unified under G-Mail, you will be able to send mail “from” any of your added accounts just as you would from Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. You will be able to create unique custom signatures for each address, and alter formatting settings for each as well, which will make it a snap to manage all of your personal and company e-mail separately under one cloud-based interface.

Setting Up Outgoing Mail

Start by logging into your G-Mail account and going to the upper right-hand gear icon and select “Settings”.

Under “Settings”, navigate to “Accounts and Import” in the top navigation bar (fig 1 below). In the “Send mail as:” section, click on the link that says “Add another email address you own” (fig 2 below).

Selecting that link will result in a popup. Put in your full name after “Name”, and your e-mail address where indicated. By default the “Treat as an alias” box is checked. Because we are setting up a secure two way connection between your company e-mail server and G-Mail, we want to uncheck that box (see below).

Select the radio bullet that says “Send through yourwebsite.com SMTP servers and the one at the bottom that says “Secured connection using SSL. For Site Image Studios clients using hostmonster based mail, your SMTP server is host257.hostmonster.com . Remember to change the port to 465 using the drop-down! Your user name will be your full e-mail address, and your password is whatever you set it to. If you have trouble remembering your password simply contact Site Image Studios and we can reset it for you. Once your information is in (see below) select “add Account”.

Now you need to access your business mail account and look for a message from Google with a verification code which you need to put into the window below (Site Image Studios clients using hostmonster can do this by adding /webmail to their domain… ex: www.yourwebaddress.com/webmail). This will authorize G-Mail to send messages through your web host. Once you hit “Verify” you are done with the outgoing mail setup.

Once you have verified your account, you have the option of making your default mail address within your G-Mail account your company account (fig a below). A drop down menu has been added to your messaging window which will allow you to select an address to send from, either your G-Mail account or one of the ones you added. Each address can be customized with unique signatures and other features commonly found in full e-mail clients like Thunderbird and Outlook.

Setting Up Incoming Mail

Now we need to set up G-Mail to receive your messages. Start by navigating back to “Accounts and Import” under “Settings” and navigate to the section entitled “Check mail from other accounts (using POP3)”. Select the “Add a POP3 mail account you own” link as indicated below.

…pretty obvious what needs to be done on the first popup.

The next window might not be so obvious. Remember: Your user name is your full e-mail address, not just your name. The POP Server is again host257.hostmonster.com for all hostmonster based accounts. Remember to change the port to 995! Do not “Leave a copy of the message on the server”… your G-Mail client will save all of your messages for you. If you do not de-select this checkbox, your messages, spam and all, will pool on your website account. Click the box that says “Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail”. This will keep the line secure in between your company mail server and Google’s G-Mail server. Finally, give your incoming messages a label. I actually just use the e-mail address (default) as my label. This will make it a lot easier for you to keep your personal and company identities separate and easier to manage. Once you have the form filled out in similar fashion to the below image, click “Add Account”.

…and THAT’S IT! No verification needed for incoming messages… a password will suffice. Now you can use G-Mail to manage all of your accounts.

That’s it for this tutorial. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog about how to customize each e-mail profile in your G-Mail account for the most professional presentation possible. Until then, thanks for stopping by Site Image Studios!