If you are like me, you have too many email accounts. Work account, personal account, account for public use (spam mostly ends up here), blog email account, side business account, test accounts from various services. Too many to check all the time. What do I do to manage them all? Truth be told, I don’t check most since they are for all intents and purposes inactive. I have 5 or so that I do care about, so I need to see when I have mail in any of them at a glance.
I do this in two ways, the iPhone and through Microsoft Outlook.
Setting up multiple accounts on the iPhone is a snap. All you do is go to the Settings application, then go to Mail, Contacts and Calendar. Choose Add Account, then choose your email provider from the list. iPhone has default settings for MobileMe, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and MS Exchange. If your provider is not in the list, just choose Other.
On the next screen, enter your name, email address, password and a description of the account (this is just a label), then touch save. The iPhone software will look for the account and verify it. If you are using an account from one of the default services that’s pretty much all you need to do. If you are adding an account for which the iPhone has no information (a GoDaddy account for example), then you will need to enter the incoming and outgoing server information from your mail provider. This information is specific to each provider, so go to your provider’s website and search for IMAP/POP settings. For example, for GoDaddy accounts, the incoming server is pop.secureserver.net and the outgoing server is smtpout.secureserver.net. Once you have the server information, enter it on the iPhone. You will also need your userid and password for your mail provider. In many cases this is just your email address or, if you have web access to your mail, then the the logon credentials you use to get in to your webmail is likely the user name you will need on the iPhone. Again, check with your email provider to be sure.
Once you have all of the credentials entered, just touch save and you are done. There are advanced settings you may need to adjust if things are not working (there are several outgoing SMTP ports – the default may not work, so try one of the others), or if you want to use SSL (and your provider provides SSL access) you will need to change port numbers and/or server names. Check with your mail provider for connection details. To change the SSL settings, go back to the list of email accounts in the Mail, Contacts and Calendar Settings and touch the account you want to change. Scroll down and touch Advanced. Turn the SSL slider on and be sure that the port settings from your provider are correct.
If you want to add another account, just go back to the list of email accounts in Mail, Contacts and Calendar Settings, click Add Account and go through the steps above for each account you want to add. Currently I have 5 active accounts on my iPhone. The nice thing is that the unread email count on the mail icon sums the number of unread emails across all accounts so I know if there is a new mail on any of them. I can then open the mail app, go to the accounts listing and see which account has new mail. Very convenient and helpful.
I won’t go into detail in this post, but setting up multiple email accounts in outlook is easy too – just follow the wizards ;) The Outlook 2007 wizards are especially helpful here, and the 2007 version handles multiple accounts far better than Outlook 2003.
