The Montoya Herald, a weblog about Blueprint, jQuery, design, music and life, publishing on the web since September 2005. Written by Christian Montoya: developer, designer and entrepreneur.

How to lead a double life

Posted on July 15, 2006.

… or, how to manage a personal and professional e-mail account in one place.

This is a lifehack for the high school, college, and young professional crowd. Let's say you are a typical young adult with two e-mail addresses. You have your personal address: qbanitaprincess38 or StrEeTgaNgsTa or something. You also have your professional address, which is something like firstname.lastname.

I think I can assume that you know Gmail is the best option for both of your e-mail addresses. It offers a lot of features you won't find elsewhere. With that out of the way, I want to show you how you can manage both of your e-mail addresses from one place:

1. In the top left of the account you want to use as your primary, click "Settings."
2. From the options under settings, click on the second one: "Accounts."
3. Underneath your current address, click on "Add another email address." Enter the necessary information. You will have to approve it from the account you add.
4. Under "When I receive a message…" choose the first option: "Reply from the same address the message was sent to."

That's all you need to do to join your personal and professional e-mail addresses without anyone ever noticing. Keep in mind that whenever you are writing a new message or reply, you can change the "from" address just by choosing the one you want in the associated select list.

This has worked very well for me. It's better than just forwarding mail from one address to another because then you still have to change accounts to respond to the messages. With this great feature from Gmail, you never have to leave your main account to handle mail. Give it a try.

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6 Comments

1. FoxyLady on July 15, 2006

   This sounds like an ad

   I didn't know you could do that. If only I had a professional address.

2. C Montoya on July 15, 2006

   Time to make one for yourself. May I recommend lady.foxy [at] gmail.com?

3. Patrick Beeson on July 17, 2006

   Very nice tip!

   I've been a gmail user since its beginning, and didn't think to mess around in the settings for this option.

   Thanks!

4. Tim Graham on July 22, 2006

   Awesome tip Christian! It works with non-gmail addresses too.

5. Yusuf on July 28, 2006

   Won't this cause the From field in the email header to show the "On Behalf Of" text next to the Gmail address you are sending from? Or does this only occur when using non-Gmail addresses?

6. C Montoya on July 28, 2006

   As far as I know, that definitely does not occur if both address are Gmail addresses.