Steps to Syncing Your Email Accounts and Devices

Ever wish you could coordinate all your e-mail accounts into one – then have that one view visible across all your devices? Although challenging, it’s possible to accomplish this with some coordinating. The following steps provide a general overview of the process. If you need help, contact Hungate Business Services at 276-243-4026, or email our help desk at help@hbsx.com.

One note of caution about work mail: Not all companies allow employees to check work email from smart phones. Check with your work IT department first to make sure it’s allowed. By doing so, you may also get special instructions for connecting to your company’s mail server.

Step 1: Your first step to synchronizing all your e-mail accounts is to set up an e-mail service account that allows IMAP access. IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol, and it’s essentially a type of remote web server that manages multiple email accounts – as opposed to being a single account (provider), accessible only from one device (such as just from your office workstation or your home PC). IMAP allows simultaneous access by multiple clients.

In order to access IMAP, we recommend you first establish an Office 365 or Gmail (Google Mail) account. What Office 365 or Gmail and IMAP can do together is gather up all your e-mails from your different addresses, provide junk mail filtering, other sorting and filtering if you need it, and consolidate your e-mail on one server so you can access it from any device and from any location. Gmail is free and works great if you are in a business where privacy is not a critical issue.

For anyone dealing with financial, human resources, or healthcare information, though, the higher privacy of an Office 365 account would be preferable and is probably required for maintaining business security.

Step 2: To set up your new account with IMAP access via Gmail, follow the instructions provided by Gmail at “Set up Gmail with Outlook, Apple Mail, or other mail clients.” Begin by following instructions for Step 1 on this page.

Next, follow the other set of instructions shown as Step 2, “Set Up Your Client,” found on that same Google webpage. You will note that in order to forward your other e-mail accounts to your new Gmail IMAP account, you will need to change your settings in your other email accounts, not in Gmail. Visit your other email providers’ help centers to find out if automatic forwarding is available and how to set it up.

To set up your new account using Office 365, go to “POP and IMAP settings for Outlook Office 365 for business.” Next, proceed down this same page to the heading, “More Outlook Office 365 Setup Instructions,” which will give you the next set of steps for syncing your devices.

Step 3: If you’ve carried out Step 2 above, then you should now be receiving all your e-mails at your new IMAP account.

Step 4: Finally, you will need to set all your separate devices (smart phone, laptop, main computer, etc.) for IMAP access to the one Office 365 or Gmail account. Since the e-mails are now sitting on a server, each device will have the exact same view. That is, if you happen to read an e-mail from your smart phone and then delete it, when you then access your e-mail account from your main computer, you’ll have the exact same email perspective. Syncing your email via IMAP provides an amazingly simple interface through which you have only one copy of each e-mail.

If you need help with this, please contact Hungate Business Services at 276-243-4026 or email our help desk at info@hbsx.com.