Setting up email

Switcher here from an old eMachines desktop clunker to a MacBook Pro coupled with a 24" display -- omg, can you imagine?

I got Mobile Me and set up that account on Apple Mail. It pushes those emails to my iPhone, so far, so good.

I'd appreciate any advice on how to manage my other two email accounts, with synching to both Apple Mail and iPhone in mind.

I realized that Hotmail doesn't have IMAP, so there would be no way of synching the subfolders of that account to Apple Mail. So I'm having Hotmail forward everything to a new GMAIL account. I exported all of my files and subfolders from Hotmail to GMAIL, and then connected the GMAIL to Apple Mail with IMAP. The folders and messages are loading into my Apple Mail as I type.

I also have an email account through Network Solutions, which only provides IMAP if you upgrade to their business account. The webmail interface there isn't too sophisticated. Previously, I just separated incoming messages from this account into folders within Outlook, without worrying about IMAP synching issues. So my questions is: Should I set up a second GMAIL account and do the same thing with my Network Solutions email that I'm doing with Hotmail?

I'd like to keep emails in Apple Mail separate, at least visually. I don't yet understand what Apple Mail will do, so setting up a redundant GMAIL account may not be the best solution. Any advice on the best practice, that keeps in mind that I'd also like to synch to the iPhone, would be great. By the way, my ME.com account doesn't really have anything in it, and I hesitate to start using it as my new email account. Hope this makes sense -- thank you.

Not sure about Apple Mail, this is why I use entourage. I have both of my personal accounts loaded in it. me.com and my other personal. Works fine. Not sure if you want to make the purchase or not, Entourage is in the Office Suite.

DaSvenska said:

Not sure about Apple Mail, this is why I use entourage. I have both of my personal accounts loaded in it. me.com and my other personal. Works fine. Not sure if you want to make the purchase or not, Entourage is in the Office Suite.

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I do the same thing; Entourage is just more flexible than Mail, although Mail is a pretty fine application.

Also, how did you manage to forward Hotmail email to a Gmail account? I've been dying to do this, but supposedly one can only forward to another Hotmail or MSN account.

Thanks to you both for the replies. (tack!) I'll check out Entourage down the road -- let's see what the Snow Leopard has in store. Hotmail has a forwarding option. It may only be for people who pay for their expanded storage, and I've been paying like $20/year. Once you set up a Gmail account, it will "import" from Hotmail. Since my posting, I went ahead and set-up a second Gmail account. The IMAP stuff is a bit tricky and I'm still working on it ... Hard to tell if everything transferred, need to do a lot of counter checking.

Apple's Mail will set up individual in boxes for each account or you can view them all via one inbox, it all depends on what you prefer. I currently use Apple Mail and have 3 e-mail accounts with it; me.com, GMail and my domain e-mail. I suspect I am doing something close to what you are looking to do.

Me.com syncs the mail to folders on both my Macs (desktop and iBook) as well as my iPhone. I don't file mail from Gmail or my domain account on my iPhone, I do all that on my desktop, that is where I believe we differ.