One Gmail Account to Rule Them All: How to Have MORE Than Five Accounts in Google’s Mail Fetcher

Google’s Mail Fetcher allows you to receive and send mail from other POP-enabled accounts. It does this by checking that account once every hour. You can navigate to it by visiting your Gmail account > Settings > Accounts.

There is a maximum to this, however. Google will not check your 25 thousand email addresses every hour. This is too much of server strain. So they figure, let’s just give each person five!

Any web-crazed person knows this isn’t enough. I probably have more than 30 accounts from more than 20 providers, including Gmail to Hotmail to Mail.com. The point is, achieving Simple Inbox (all your email in one place and Inbox Zero together) isn’t possible anymore.

One of the choices are to fetch email to one account and have another account fetch that. The problem with this is that you don’t know where it is from.

So you quickly fill up your five available slots now. You’ve got it to label your email so you easily know what email address it is from.

And now you’ve got a 6th Gmail email (it only works for more Gmail emails; don’t know about others). Here’s how to do it.

Have that Gmail open. Navigate to Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP and get to the forwarding section. Type in the email address you want to forward to and then make Gmail archive “its copy”.

Now log out and log back into the email address you are forwarding to. Make a label saying all email from the previous account goes into the label.

And there you have it. A simple way to do something simple. Not a complex way to do something simple. And what simple thing am I talking about: going easy on yourself. You shouldn’t have to work to relax. Now you won’t have to switch from inbox to inbox!