gmail app as a combined inbox

I switched to gmail, but I still have hotmail and yahoo accounts I don't want to get rid of. I was sick of checking three different accounts both on pc and android phone.

So I set up gmail as a combined inbox as follows:

1. Gmail can fetch email from pop3 accounts - see here for more info

My preferred settings:

Leave a copy of retrieved messages on the server, so that your legacy account retains copies of all emails fetched by gmail and can continue to be used independently - why have gmail as a single point of failure?

Label incoming messages - this is crucial to be able to differentiate the accounts that emails belong to

You can also set up the smtp side so that when you reply to a fetched email in gmail, the replies are sent from your legacy email.

2. Use account "views". Once you have set up pop3, your inbox will contain emails from multiple accounts which can be confusing to work with.

To view only emails from a legacy account, select the label on the left hand side.

Viewing only your gmail emails is a bit fiddlier. In the search box you can filter out all non-gmail labels by using the -label: operator.

Example: if you have set up the a@hotmail.com and b@yahoo.com accounts to be fetched into gmail, you can filter these out by entering the following in the search box:

-label: a@hotmail.com -label:b@yahoo.com

It's a pain to have to type into the search box every time, so luckily there is a feature you can enable in the labs to save this search as a "quick link".

Select Settings:Labs and Enable the Quick Links feature. Then go back to your Inbox, enter your filter search term and click Add Quick Link. A dialog box pops up allowing you to name the quick link (you could call it "Gmail Only"). Click OK and the quick link is created.

Now you can just click the Gmail Only quick link to filter out the emails fetched from other accounts.

3. Account "views" in the Gmail app for Android

The Gmail app for Android is not nearly as feature rich as the PC version. It does allow you to select labels to filter the view, but it does not have Quick Links. I was worried that Gmail would be unusable if I couldn't easily filter out legacy account emails.

Luckily it turns out that the Android version handles exactly the same search operators as the PC version, and previous searches are saved for reuse.

So you can key in the search above and it will be available for reuse as a recent search. This isn't as nice as Quick Links and it's possible you might have to rekey the search once in a while. But it's good enough for me.