Universal email account

[phantomdentist]

This has been covered in several forums, several blogs, server tutorials and still I can't find an answer that quite works.

I'm sure alot of us by this point have numerous email address we need to access frequently or infrequently. I personal have...

1. A Personal email (myname@gmail.com)
2. A Spam email (myspamname@gmail.com)
3. Three business addresses (myname@mydomain.com)
4. A gaming email address (mygamername@gmail.com)

It would be bloody helpful, and is getting by now essential, to be able to use all of these email addresses from 1 webmail account.

What I need to be able to do is the following....

1. Log into just 1 webmail account to access all of my email from all of my email accounts

2. Send from any of these email addresses from 1 webmail account. Importantly doing this needs to show no signs to the recipient that the email is coming via any other address. For instance when you do this through gmail logged in as mymasteraccount@gmail.com and selecting myotheraccount@gmail.com as the sender address the message recieved by the recipient shows

"From: mymasteraccount@googlemail.com on behalf of myotheraccount (myotheraccount@gmail.com)"

3. Do both of the above steps from a mobile device setup to use the mymasteraccount@gmail.com email address

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The above 3 are essential, the things below would be bloody useful but are not essential.

a. Have the email from different addresses clearly desinguishable from each other within the same inbox. Ie email from

mymasteraccount@gmail.com appear - in blue labled with the address
myname@mydomain.com appear - in red labled with the address
myothername@myotherdomain.com - in orange labled with the address

b. Have the spam email address emails stored in a different folder. Its good to be able to scan through all my emails from my clients, friends, colleagues etc in one window but be able to tell them apart by colour or another means. However, my spam inbox will of course be full of crap that I'm not interested in sorting out. I don't want to be seeing this as I'm looking through my "proper" email addresses.

c. Use different signature for each address from both pc and mobile device.

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Think thats about.

I can't find any way to do this fully using gmail and don't think its possible. Can it be done with any other webmail service (free or paid) or microsoft exchnage server or another email server/client?

Thanks

[mvip]

I hear you. I have the same problem. I have 7 different email accounts I use everyday. However, I use them in Apple Mail, so once they're all configured, the problem is pretty much solved.

You can kind of do this with Gmail/Google Apps too though. If you configure one account to be the 'master' account, you can configure it to fetch all the other accounts (and label the messages). You can also configure outgoing emails so that they are sent using a different account or SMTP server. The 'Sent on behalf of' should only show up if you have not verified the account.

As far as the mobile issue issue goes, you can simply use the mobile version of the client (m.gmail.com). I know it's not as useful as a native client, but it gets the job done.

Regarding signatures -- I'm not sure about that part.

[xmailer]

Unfortunately, I don't believe Gmail has provision for customizing the signature per identity, so to speak. I thought that there might be some slim possibility that this might be available as one of their "labs" features, but having looked through same, as seems so often the case to me with their labs features, they'd apparently rather offer only minor tweaks and relatively useless "fun" features than something more practical as suggested by the OP:

Signature tweaks
by Keith C and Dave C
Places your signature before the quoted text in a reply, and removes the "--" line that appears before signatures.

Random Signature
by Chad P
Rotates among random quotations for your email signature.

Location in Signature
by Marco B
Appends your location to your signature. You must have your signature enabled. Please enable gears for higher accuracy.

[JRobert]

Fastmail can support what you ask and I already do most of it (I don't host a personal domain). FM's domain hosting will accomplish having 3 business addresses. Everything else is doable with personalities (outgoing mail) and aliases (incoming mail).

Personal address: That's your main account name, or if you choose to keep that totally private, your primary personality

Spam addresses: With an FM alias you can make up addresses on the fly; no need to prepare them first at FM, e.g. untrusted_company(at)myalias.fastmaildomain.tld

Gaming address: ditto what I said about spam addresses. Could use the same or a different myalias....

Business address: Forward your domain to, or better, host it at, Fastmail.

As to filing your various kinds of messages, each personality can specify where it's outgoing messages are to be stored. FM's Sieve can file your incoming mail according to rules you specify.

If you elected to have FM host your domain, you'd need an Enhanced level account. You could do everything else with one of the lesser accounts. Which level would depend on the amount of storage and transfer quota (what they refer to as bandwidth), and the number of aliases and personalities you'd need.

[ReuvenNY]

If you use an email client like Thunderbird, you can have all your accounts set there as IMAP accounts and I believe you can accomplish everything you need that way.

[jeffpan]

I have many (100+) acctounts from different providers.
I am also trying to find a way to manage all those accts from one place.
My friends always don't know currently I'm using which email account, and me too, just be tired about this.

[nooby]

The newest trend seems to be to offer online "desktops" so you have your email client online instead of in the HDD.

That way one could fire up Thunderbird??? online and that one does all what you wanted?

Or maybe me get it all wrong?

[David]

Originally Posted by nooby

The newest trend seems to be to offer online "desktops" so you have your email client online instead of in the HDD.

That way one could fire up Thunderbird??? online and that one does all what you wanted?

Or maybe me get it all wrong?

That's the truth and is what we had in the early days - before the 'internet' was properly established (as the ever prevailing medium for all) - serve me up a shell account please

[ChinaLamb]

I do this with fastmail and with Outlook IMAP, Using a program called Realaccount to manage the personalities, which are divided by folder, not by color.

I think you will find that you get your emails mixed up if they are all in the same folder, esp. when writing new emails.

In Outlook using Realaccount and Fastmail, When I am in the "Work" folder, new emails automatically get my work email address and work signature. Same for all the other folders.

Depending on your smartphone client, you may need to experiment. My phone setup is not as clean as I'd like it to be...

[chrisretusn]

I can do everything you are want to do but with an e-mail client.

[phantomdentist]

Excellent. Will get on that then and post up which option if found easiest/most useful.

Thank you all for your input

[David]

When I think of universal email I tend to think of international; which leads me to think of Smartphones and SIM cards.

I have a few SIM cards that I use when traveling. Being able to tie any (and all) of these easily, to any of my email accounts would be a boon - but it is not always easy (or cheap) to get access to data when traveling. So, what if some enterprising, humongous, email provider, started to sell universal SIM cards, that would work anywhere in the world at reasonable rates. Access to data would of course be a given (access to you know who's email account would be free) You know it will come eventually, And you know who it will be who will sell it to you first - the only thing that is missing now is the SIM!

A true universal email account - yes please

[nooby]

Yes, smartphones are used more and more and often it is internet cafe or a cafe that have wireless but no computers. You bring your own or use your smartphone.

Maybe that is why people use texting so much. Faster to set up than emails? Already kind of activated and you save the phone number and send direct to the phone number you don't have to know their email address.

Sad that they didn't make SMS more like emails so it could be sent using ordinary email clients.

[ChinaLamb]

It's only an amout of time till email takes over sms... Smart phones are becomming so standard, that I send and receive emails from my phone, as you stated. People will be fed up with paying for sms, even in bulk. Google is coming out with a cell phone that is all voip, so they are going to change the game. I look forward to the day when everything is a flat standard rate for unlimited bandwith and it handles all phone, email, texting, or whatever. Gmail may have too much of my data, but at least they are forcing a change the game....

Till then, send free sms's via email:

T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
Cingular: phonenumber@cingularme.com
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com

where phonenumber = your 10 digit phone number