Web In Depth

I think by now you would know that I am into heavy experimenting on the web. This is the best way to learn about anything and I know that my knowledge of web is increasing due to this. Also more importantly only one guy will have to do all the hard work (that’s me) and all of you would get to know what works and what does not, thus simplifying your lives. Remember that knowledge is enhanced by collaboration(what is generally considered true is that if two people get together they have more knowledge than the addition of their knowledge) so please participate and leave a comment and let us know what worked for you and let me know what you want to know.

Enough rambling and back to web stuff. One thing I have been really concerned for some time is the amount of time wasted on the web. I mean we do some mundane stuff multiple times without really using that time for better utilization of web 2.0 features. One of these is the good old e-mail that has been there from the beginning of Internet.

Without further ado let me outline my problem.

I have multiple web based (and free) accounts for different purposes and lately managing them all seems to take more time than I care to spend. One problem is that I have to authorize each account, this is common to all services and probably going to be solved by OpenID (I’ll blog on this some later date). But not only that but just checking mail at different places or adding rules on filters etc… at several places is difficult. So I googled around for any documents that specify how to handle multiple accounts. I came across an articles witch described how to use Gmail as the central e-mail system and manage other accounts. I was pretty happy with this as I also has considered using Gmail as main manager due to its rich features.

What they have said was pretty simple

1. Forward your mails from whatever address to gmail address. This will direct all the mail from other mail services to send the mail they receive to Gmail, thus allowing to read all mail from one place.

2. Add other mail address to send list, this will effectively give you the option to send from any of the addresses in the list not from gmail address. This is important as you want to reply from the address the mail was send to as it commands authority and hides your gmail address.

I was pretty happy with all this until I read the comments. It seems things were not working as it should and users were facing several problems, mainly

1. Some web based mail services does not allow mail forwarding.

2. Some clients (especially outlook showed name@domain.com via name@gmail.com which effectively nullified the option of sending from one client.

Another suggestion was Gmail has an option to import mail from other mail services. But a complain against this was it does not do this that frequently.

So it was time for me to go out and try this for myself, and try to solve the issues. Below are the detailed steps I took and there results.

1. My multiple accounts are as follows

a.Gmail account for important notifications.
b.Yahoo account for official work
c.Hotmail account for subscribing for free offers etc…
d.Lycos account for an ongoing project.
e.University mail
f) ISP mail
g. domain mail which I didn’t use for this test.

Now at hotmail I found that mail forwarding is allowed but they warned that I need to check in within 120 days to keep my account.

I bumped into the first brick wall at Lycos, were there was no option for forwarding. The story was same at yahoo. This was bad because it is these two that I mostly want to be handled by Gmail. The hotmail account is something I’ll like to keep separate as it gets bombarded by offers that is a pain to check every day.

Still I thought “obviously my university mail and ISP mail must work:” But both did not have the forwarding option (what the heck is going on!!!)this is when I remembered the other method to use Gmail to bring mail from other web mail.

Therefore I logged into Gmail clicked on settings and it had a option telling send mail address. I entered that and a popup asked for my other mail and its password. I gave them for yahoo and……..Error. I gave them for Lycos and………….Error. It said I am not allowed in to the server. Now this is getting very frustrating, so I googled again and came up with the answer.

To access a webmail from a desktop client or some other service like Gmail you need POP (post office protocol) support and free accounts of both Yahoo and Lycos does not support this. Now I was no way going to upgrade to paid account, so I need another way. Now I thought my university mail must support POP so I entered that address and this time its security certificate has expired and no access again.

So here I am after al that effort back to square one. Instead of managing all accounts from one place I still can’t get any mail (except hotmail) to forward to one account.

Well is it a disaster? No not really, for one experiments are not all success stories. On the contrary they fail most of the time. But that failure is a lesson from which we can learn. I hope you learned your lesson from my failure that all webmail is not forwardable and if they have no POP then getting them to one place is darn difficult(difficult, not impossible). So if you have a service that support forwarding or POP go and send your multiple accounts to one client and tell me the results. Anybody with premium accounts can do this easily.

What about the rest of us, are we going to accept the bitter truth and reserve ourselves to multiple account nightmare. No NO NO we will fight back.

PS: I did some experimentation and there is methods to bypass POP restriction. See you should always have faith in experiments. I’ll let you know as soon as I get everything sorted out.