Forward your Gmail to Outlook or Thunderbird
Last Friday I described how to receive messages sent to your ISP mail account in your Gmail inbox. Lots of people prefer the sorting, contact lists, and other features of their client mail program, so today I'm going to turn things around and tell you how to forward mail sent to your Gmail address in the Outlook or Thunderbird inbox for your ISP mail account.
Start by logging into Gmail, clicking the Settings link in the top-left corner, and selecting Forwarding and POP/IMAP. If your ISP uses POP3, choose Enable POP for all mail if you want to see all your current Gmail messages in your desktop mail app, or Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on if you want to keep your existing Gmail stuff where it is and get only new messages forwarded to your mail program. In the drop-down menu to the left of "When messages are accessed with POP," you can choose to keep the messages in your Gmail inbox, archive them automatically, or delete them. If your ISP mail account uses IMAP, simply click Enable IMAP. When you're done, click Save Changes.
Set Gmail to forward its messages to the POP account in your desktop mail program.
Once you've got Gmail set to forward, you're ready to add the account to your desktop mail program. If you use Outlook 2003, click Tools*E-mail Accounts, choose Add a new e-mail account, and click Next. On the Server Type screen, select POP3 or IMAP, whichever you set Gmail to, and click Next again. Enter your name, Gmail address, logon name and password, and the incoming and outgoing server addresses: pop.gmail.com and smtp.gmail.com, respectively, if you use POP, or imap.gmail.com and smtp.gmail.com, respectively, if you use IMAP. Finally, click Next and Finish.
Configure Outlook 2003 to download your Gmail messages automatically.
Access Outlook 2007's Add New E-mail Account wizard by clicking Tools*Account Settings*New. Choose Microsoft Exchange, POP3, IMAP, or HTTP, and click Next. Fill in your name, e-mail address, and password (twice), and then click Next again. The program will attempt an encrypted connection, and will opt for an unencrypted one if the first try fails.
Connect Gmail With Thunderbird
To add your Gmail account to Mozilla Thunderbird, click Tools*Account Settings*Add Account, choose Email account, and click Next. Enter your name and Gmail address, and click Next again. Choose POP or IMAP, whichever is appropriate, enter the Gmail server address (either pop.gmail.com or imap.gmail.com), leave User Global Inbox (store mail in Local Folders) checked if you want the mail kept in Thunderbird as well as in Gmail, and click Next once again.
Use Thunderbird's Account Wizard to add your Gmail messages to the mail program.
Enter your "Incoming user name" (if Thunderbird doesn't add it to the field automatically), click Next, type in your Gmail address (Thunderbird should do this for you as well), and click Next one more time. Check over the account settings, click Finish, and then OK.
Tomorrow: Reset Microsoft Word's faulty defaults.
Dennis O'Reilly has covered PCs and other technologies in print and online since 1985. Along with more than a decade as editor for Ziff-Davis's Computer Select, Dennis edited PC World's award-winning Here's How section for more than seven years. He is a member of the CNET blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET.
