Zoho Mail – How to add a new mail account to Zoho Mail

Posted on Apr 11, 2009 in Online Storage, Productivity, Test Drive Apps by dee 1 Comment

Welcome to Part II of my Zoho articles. (Part I here). This drills down further into one of the Zoho applications (namely Zoho Mail) and gives you some guidance around setting up Zoho Mail as your primary mail application.

Zoho Mail by default gives you a @zoho email address (yes, yet another email address), which I’m not too keen on as i have many already. Instead I wanted to add my Newbtech and Gmail mail accounts so that i can access them via Zoho Mail.

Most broadband providers have an online offering in terms of allowing you to access and create mail from the web without having to use large windows/linux based clients such as Microsoft Outlook. However, if you’re anything like me, you may most likely have quite a few of these accounts and Zoho mail allows the user to maintain all these accounts within one application.

Zoho Mail is a fully featured mail application with facilities to attach documents from your local drive through to Google Docs. It supports folders, labels and other functionality commonly found in Microsoft Outlook for instance.

It’s interface is familiar and clean and makes checking your mail from multiple accounts a cinch. It has a good Address book functionality though I couldn’t see an “Import Contacts” function anywhere.

Step 1 – start by logging onto Zoho (http://www.zoho.com) and clicking on Zoho Mail. (Alternatively, you can always go to http://mail.zoho.com). Zoho Mail interface should be familiar to anyone who’s use email applications before (similar to Outlook or Outlook Express).

Your folders, labels and views are listed on the left toolbar, with additional navigation on the top of the screen. The bulk of the screen shows you a list of your emails with a preview pane at the bottom.

Step 2 – Click on the Settings link on the top navigation bar. In the resulting window, click on Mail Accounts on the top. This will take you to the list of mail accounts you have registered with Zoho Mail. Initially, this will be your @zoho.com email address.

What we want to do here is to add a new POP3 email account. POP3 is your basic standard email account settings. Most people registered with any broadband provider has a pop3 email address.

For now, we want to add our Gmail account to Zoho so that we have a central place to check our mail. Click on “Add Mail Account” on the top.

Step 3 – In the form that appears, enter the fields in as per the screenshot. If you are trying to add an email address other than Gmail, you will need to get the POP3 settings from your provider. They will normally have that on their website somewhere, so do a search for it.

Hit Save when you finished entering the form in.

 

 

If you have entered everything successfully, the list of your email accounts will show up under Mail Accounts:

To see the contents of that email account, above the Folders on the left side of the screen, your username should now be a drop down. Click on the drop down and you should see your other account there. Click it to go to that accounts Inbox. If you have many emails on that account, it might take a while for Zoho to fetch all the mail.

Step 4 – Repeat the same for any other POP3 email account you may have.

The default server settings when adding a new email account is to leave the mail on the original server. This is excellent as you may have multiple clients (as I do) and want the mail to be available on all the clients. However, if you do wish to change this, you can do so by clicking on the “Personalize” tab and going to the Server Settings page. This is also where you can set up your signature and folder structures for that email account.

On the Mail Accounts page, you can select any of your email accounts and make it the Default or edit them further if you wish.

In order to send an email using any of your accounts, ensure that you have selected that user first and then click on Compose to create and send a new email. You can switch the “Sending user” easily by adding your other email addresses in “My Preferences”. If you add additional addresses here, you can switch the email address you want to send as when composing new emails.

 

One last thing to note: Microsoft Outlook has something called Rules which are events that trigger something. For example, if a new mail arrives and meets a certain criteria (eg, subject contains “Comment”), then you can flag or move that email. Google Mail has similar functionality called Filters. Zoho Mail has the same functionality and you can get to it once again from the Personalize tab.

Thats pretty much it. The application is quite self explanatory otherwise and if you have used any email clients in the past, you should be comfortable using Zoho Mail.

Tags: Cool Apps, Productivity, Test Drive, Test Drive Apps, Tutorials, Zoho

• Pingback: Zoho Personal - Online Office Suite. An Overview ~ Newb Tech