Gmail stopped collecting your other accounts

Gmail could log into up to five other mailboxes over POP3 and pull their mail into your inbox. Combined with “Send mail as”, it gave you one inbox for several addresses. Google removed the fetching half.

Worth remembering what it was like even when it worked: a hard cap of five accounts, and a fetch schedule that could leave a message sitting for the better part of an hour.

Forwarding still works and Google didn’t touch it. In each mailbox, set a rule that forwards to your main Gmail. If your domains are on Cloudflare, Email Routing does this for free with no mailbox at all.

Then add each address under Settings → Accounts → “Send mail as” so replies go out from the right one. This genuinely works, and if you have two or three addresses it is probably all you need.

It gets thin at scale. Every address needs its own SMTP setup in that list, Gmail doesn’t always pick the right sender on reply, and once everything is in one stream you lose track of which product a message even belongs to.

• No limit. Three addresses or forty, the price is the same.
• Seconds, not a fetch cycle. Forwarded mail reaches you as it arrives.
• Grouped by project. Every notification is tagged, so you know which product is being asked about before you open it.
• Replies just work. Answer the notification and it goes out from the original address, in the original thread — no per-address setup in Gmail.

On Outlook rather than Gmail? The same problem has its own set of workarounds.

All Your Inboxes costs $9.99 a month with a 7-day trial. Your mailboxes stay exactly where they are; we never take over your MX records or restructure anything.