Fetch It!
A guide to merging your email accounts that should help you avoid blacklisting and downtime…
How many email accounts do you have floating around the web? The average person has access to between five and seven. School, work, home… they tend to add up quickly.
How many email accounts do you actually check on a regular basis? This number is most likely lower than the previous one. Surveys suggest that the average person checks between two and five a day.
Unchecked email accounts can be a real hassle, but there are tools available to make these pesky accounts manageable. We know that they mostly contain junk mail that we don’t want, but what about that rare important message that you really wish you would have received? Never miss the catch-up from an old friend or notice from an old account again. Email services like Gmail and Yahoo! have a great solution to these duplicate email address problems.
Rather than forwarding the bulk of your emails to a frequently accessed account, most major email providers have a great mail tool that can import old messages and will continue to retrieve messages sent to your old account for as long as you keep the tool activated. Gmail’s mail fetching lets you add up to five separate email addresses at any given time to allow you to forget those old email logins (be sure to write them down- just in case!). The fetching tool is handy because unlike forwarding all messages, you can avoid all the junk mail and see only the messages sent to your inbox. This is very convenient for large email accounts and can save you from hassles later on.
Fetching email also protects your email account from being blacklisted for emailing spam. Let’s explain: Large email providers maintain their own blacklists. Reports are generated to alert the providers when users are sending spam. Forwarding spam from one account to the other is still considered spamming even though you didn’t create the original spam message. The provider just notices that you are sending too many messages. Forwarding a large amount of messages to another account that you own can cause your account register to list your activities in their reports as spam. You most likely wouldn’t notice that it is even happening. This is due to the fact that the spam is being forwarded from one spam folder to the other, never being seen by your eyes. For more information on what to do if you’ve been blacklisted visit last week’s blog on the topic.
Switching to remote POP fetching, rather than forwarding, is an easy way to prevent having any troubles with being blacklisted. CANSPAM laws, which regulate how businesses use commercial email, are quite strict, and can lead to fines of up to $16,000 per email if you break the rules. So this easy feature can stop you from facing downtime, not to mention the fines. Fetching email is a great way to avoid this problem altogether.
For step by step instructions on how to activate your email’s fetching tool visit the knowledge base of our sister company, WestHost.