How to configure forwarding and POP/IMAP access for your Gmail account

With Gmail, you get quite a bit of access to your mail. This tutorial should help you understand how to put that access to good use.

Gmail gives you the option of activating POP and IMAP access on your account. This allows you to check and send mail using an email client like Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook.

You can also have Gmail forward all your mail to a specific email address.

To do any of this, you'll need to go to Settings.

Then click Forwarding and POP/IMAP.

If you've watched the tutorial on Filters, you should know that you can set up a filter to forward some of your mail to another email address.

The Forwarding feature here is similar, but this will forward all of your mail.

Click this button to enable forwarding.

Then, select the phrase email address and replace it with your email address.

You'll also need to decide what you want Gmail to do with your mail after it's been forwarded it to you.

We'll set ours to archive.

Forwarding has been configured. Now to set up POP/IMAP access.

Mail accounts with POP and IMAP access are not usually given away for free, but fortunately Gmail does this. These two protocols are how you'd typically access an email account given to you by your web hosting provider.

POP access to your mail should be enabled by default.

If this isn't the case, you have two options, described here. We'll choose the first.

As before, we'll tell Gmail to archive mail after it's been accessed with POP.

Scroll down.

To finish setting up POP access, you'll need to configure your email client. Instructions can be found via this link.

IMAP access is generally preferred over POP, as long as your mail client supports it and is supported by Gmail.

IMAP is disabled by default. Click here to enable it, if you want, but we'll leave ours disabled.

When finished here, click Save Changes.

This is the end of the tutorial. You now know how to configure forwarding and POP/IMAP access for your Gmail account.