Why Should Google Collect Mail Instead of an Email Forwarder?
Gmail has gone a bit weird and sometimes emails forwarded simply vanish. I have seen this happen for customers and for me as well.
Additionally, it is very common for mail forwarding to cause blacklisting or a slow down with many large email providers. This most commonly occurs when large amounts of mail are forwarded by different users sharing the same server and it is marked as spam after it has been received at gmail - keep in mind that even if you don't see the spam, it is still forwarded to gmail on your behalf.
This results in 123host's mail server's sending reputation being penalized since it was the last server to send the mail. Ultimately, 123host will become blacklisted with the email provider and it will affect all of the users on the server. This has happened more than once and is a pain for everyone.
A solution to all this is to stop mail forwarding to gmail and make a switch to get gmail to collect it instead. Usin the POP protocol, you effectively get gmail to pull the email rather than 123host pushing it.
Note: In order to successfully fetch mail you must first create an email account matching your email address within your 123host control panel for the mail to be fetched from.
If you have multiple email addresses being forwarded to the one gmail account, the best method I have found is to create an email account forwarder@example.com and forward all your email addresses to that address. Then have gmail fetch from forwarder@example.com which now contains all your email.
Google Mail collector is relatively easy to set up and free to use. It uses the POP3 protocol to pull all the contents of your mail box into Gmail and as a bonus it then checks the emails for spam.
Once it is set up, Google will check those accounts on a regular basis, and new mail will appear automatically in Gmail. The video is pretty comprehensive, or if you prefer the written word...
- Log into your Gmail account.
- Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the page and select Settings.
- Click the Accounts tab and locate the Check mail from other accounts section.
- Click Add an email account.
- Enter the full email address of the account from which you'd like mail fetched.
- Click Next Step.
- In the Password field, enter the password for the email address you provided.
- Select Port 110
- Do not check Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail
- Click Add Account.
After successfully adding your account, you'll also have the option of making the added account a custom From address. This will allow you to compose messages in Gmail but have them appear to be sent from you@example.com
The only down side is that gmail fetch frequency will be adjusted according to how much mail you receive. If you receive a lot it will be more frequent that if you don't get much. So if you don't get much mail and someone sends you something important, it might not be collected by gmail for some time.
