Use Gmail to Manage ALL Your Mail and More…

You might find this statement hard to believe, but Gmail can offer you a way to manage all your email from one place - your Gmail account of course! Now, firstly, let’s talk about the basics - sending and receiving email.
Firstly - sending email. Using Gmail you can send emails from any email account that belongs to you and I mean any. To do this, log into your Gmail account and go to ’settings’. Under settings, select the ‘Accounts’ tab, which will show you a screen like this:
From here, select ‘Add another email address’ and select an email address you wish to send email from. You can add as many such addresses as you want. Now, a verification email will be sent to that address with a special code. Now, you have to enter that code in your Gmail account for verification, so that you can start sending email from that address. This way, you can send all your emails from one place using Gmail’s rich text and graphics features.
Not everybody sends emails from many different addresses but many people receive their email on different addresses. Now, I shall present a few methods to collect all your email into your Gmail account. The first problem is that Gmail does not feature POP3/IMAP imports, so the quick fix for that is to get a Bluebottle account, import all your email onto that and use it’s forwarding features to forward the message to your Gmail account.
Chat: Using some Javascript, Google have integrated their Google Talk service with Gmail. Whenever you are logged online and somebody send you a message, it will pop up in your Gmail windows at the bottom like so:
Now, you can chat away directly from your Gmail account! Also, if you wish, all your conversations will be recorded and saved in a “Chats” folder.
Now, we come to some other features that Gmail provides. Firstly, mobile access. If you are on the move with nothing to access your email other than your WAP compatible phone, then Gmail comes in handy again. Gmail has a WAP portal(http://m.gmail.com) which you can use to send and receive mails. Now we come to POP/SMTP. In case you didn’t already know, Google offers full support for POP3/SMTP which enables you to send and receive your mail from your preferred email client such as Microsoft Outlook. For more details on how to set this up, you can visit this page.
Rich Editing: Gmail’s WYSWYG editor supports several formatting features, such as bold, italic, colors, alignment, quotes, indentation, highlighting, ordered and unordered lists and it also provides for spelling checks in the 39 different languages that it features:
US and UK English, simplified and traditional Chinese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
Switching to Gmail and Importing ContactsGoogle also provides a small help section on how to switch from other email providers with information on how to export and import contacts. Gmail supports importing contacts from .CSV files, which can be done as follows:
Sign in to your Gmail account at mail.google.comClick ‘Contacts’ along the left side of any Gmail page.Click ‘Import’.Select the .CSV file you’d like to import by clicking ‘Browse…’Once you’ve located your file, click ‘Import Contacts’.
You can also view an animated demo for the same here.
Mail through SyndicationGoogle allows you to receive your email using the ATOM syndication format. For this you can use any aggregator that supports ATOM 0.3 with HTTP and HTTPS authentication. All you have to do is subscribe to this feed:
https://mail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom
Then, just enter your address and password when asked for and you’re ready to go. A list of compatible aggregators is available here. Please bear in mind that these feeds are completely secure and not publicly accessible.
Gmail NotifierThe Gmail Notifier is a downloadable application that alerts you whenever you have new Gmail messages. After you download the Notifier, an icon will appear in your system tray(so you don’t have to open a browser) to let you know if you have unread Gmail messages. Click here to download Gmail Notifier.
Labels: Labels are very much like tags and help you in organizing your email. You can assign as many labels as you wish to one conversation(mail along with all it’s replies).

Filters: Filters help you in sorting your email into different as per your defined criteria. Gmail allows for upto 20 different filters which you can set up with a variety of possible fields such as ‘To’, ‘From’, ‘Subject’, etc.

Attachments: Google supports up to 10 MB of attachments per mail. Google does not accept EXE files as attachments and it won’t work even if you compress them into .zip, .tar, .tgz, .taz, .z, .gz or some other compressed format. You may try converting the file’s extension to some other innocent format by using the following DOS command in the relevant directory:
ren abc.exe abc.txt

ren *.exe *.txt
The first command will convert the file abc.exe to abc.txt. Similarly, you can perform a batch conversion with the second command.
Gmail for Online Storage:I have already written two articles on how to use Gmail as an online drive. There are three different ways in which you can use Gmail as an online drive. For Windows you can use GmailDrive and for a Mac you can use GDisk. Or you can use an Online interface like XMailHardDrive as well.