Gmail about to make life even easier

So a bit over a month ago (early November), I managed to set up an autoforward for my root e-mail account on my hill-kleerup.org domain, so that all mail goes from there to my Gmail account (previously the host didn’t do that). The idea is that now I can do everything I want from Gmail as the client (including send mail under the virtual header of my native account, though some mail clients see it as being sent “on behalf of”).

And, frankly, I’m loving using Gmail. It’s great having full-blown e-mail access wherever I go, and I love Gmail’s threading technology and built-in search.

Now, it appears, Google is going to make it even better, and easier to do what I (and many other folks) have been doing via forwards: Mail Fetcher.

Gmail allows you to fetch mail from your other, non-Gmail accounts. You’ll be able to read email from up to 5 additional accounts, all in one place, and take advantage of all of Gmail’s great features. Note that the email accounts you would like to fetch will need to support POP access. Some free email services don’t support POP access at this time.

In other words, it will let Gmail act as a POP client. I don’t have to autoforward — I can let Google go out and grab stuff as it comes in. And looking at the options …

• Leave a copy of retrieved messages on the server. If you’ll only be accessing your email through your Gmail account, leave this unchecked. If you’d like to be able to access your mail directly from that account, or if you’re accessing it through any other accounts or devices, click to select this option.
• Label incoming messages. If you’d like to automatically label all messages that are retrieved from your non-Gmail account, select this option. You can choose to use the predefined label (your email address), or you can select an existing label or create a new one from the drop-down list.
• Archive incoming messages. Mail from this account can be archived directly, without showing up in your Inbox. Learn more about archiving.

So, again, you can use it just as a browser of mail (like mail2web), or you can actually suck it over permanently into your Gmail account. And you can send mail directly labeled with the account name, rather than something that shows up “on behalf of” the account.

Sweet.

Unfortunately …

This feature is currently only enabled for a limited number of users. We’re working on making it more available soon.

You can see if it’s on your Gmail account yet by going to Settings -> Accounts and looking for “Get mail from other accounts.” Not showing up for me, yet … but, hopefully, soon. I don’t know that it makes Gmail perfect, but it makes it even better than it was before.

(via Google Blogscoped)