Managing email accounts can be very tiresome. You would like to have a situation in which, wherever you are in the world, you are able to receive your email, send your email and have all your archived emails at your disposal. And in addition you want these new activities to be archived as if you have been performing all these actions from your local pc. Achieving this goal is far from simple.

Multiple accounts

Nowadays many scientists will have multiple accounts. Either because they have more than one affiliation, or they want to maintain low-security mail accounts – like Yahoo!, Hotmail, or Google – and a high-security account for their professional correspondence.

http://www.yahoo.com/

http://www.hotmail.com

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/about.html

Prestige of account name

Be aware that your email address is in some way your business card. So when you work at Harvard University and write an important email to the dean, it does not make a good impression to do it through your Yahoo! account.

You can more or less hide your low-profile email address when you send messages through it, by supplying an alias inside your sending email address, like

“J.Doe@yahoo.com”<John Doe> and instruct your email client to use as the reply address your prestigious mail account, like “J.Doe@harvard.edu.org”, the latter of course without an alias.

Automatic forwarding

When you have multiple accounts, you may want to choose that emails received by some of your mailboxes be forwarded (redirected is a better term) to one of your other mailboxes.

Whatever way you choose to have your email forwarded from one (POP3) server to a second server, your email client – or the first server itself – should be configured such as not to leave a copy on the server after it has forwarded the message. If you do not configure your email client in this way you will continuously end up with numerous duplications of email messages: a horrible situation when your inboxes are your To-Do lists.

A drawback of not leaving a copy on the server is that you must be very careful when synchronizing your email, otherwise you will lose email messages.

Hard forward

One solution to the problem of managing multiple accounts is having all the mail forwarded to one account.