Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Forwarding Your Chinook Mail to Your Gmail Account

Quite a number of Chinook employees consolidate their mail accounts within Gmail to take advantages of the many advantages that Gmail offers over other web-mail services and local-software email clients. If you are one of these, you may be interested in this tech tip.



Up until now, if people have expressed an interest in Gmail, the Elearning team has always showed them how to configure Gmail to perform POP retrieval on their Chinook account. This works, but it means that email retrieval is intermittent, which disappoints many, including me.

I've always found mail forwarding to be much slicker than POP retrieval because it's instantaneous. With mail forwarding, the user instructs the source account (eg. Chinook) to automatically send all messages it receives on to the aggregating account (eg. Gmail); therefore, the moment a message lands in the source account's inbox, it's immediately transferred to the aggregate account.

This morning it occurred to me that I should do this with my Sasktel personal mail, and forward it directly to my Gmail account. That's when I had one of those rare flashes of savantism that have allowed me to continue to hold down a job over the years. The regular Chinook web interface doesn't allow mail forwarding, even though the original interface - several years back - did. But what about the Zimbra interface, which was introduced a few months back? Yup, you guessed it. Success.

If you want to follow in my savant footsteps, here's the procedure. The first stage is setting up mail forwarding for your Chinook account. To do this:

  • Log in to the portal 
  • Click on the "Try Zimbra Mail" link in the upper, left-hand corner. 
  • You will see a number of tabs across the top of the page. Click on the Preferences tab 
  • Within Preferences, click on the Mail tab. (Nested tabs - Bleccchhh!) 
  • Scroll down, if necessary, to see the "Receiving Mail" section. 
  • In the "Forward a copy to" field, type your Gmail address
  • Check the "don't keep a local copy of messages" option to keep your Chinook inbox from becoming bloated. 
  • Click on the Save button that appears between the two rows of tabs at the top. 
That sets up forwarding. Now you can delete the POP access configuration you set up in Gmail. Within Gmail:
  • Click on Settings > Accounts and Forwarding 
  • In the "Get mail from other accounts section, click on the Delete link beside your Chinook account. Done. 
Now messages to your Chinook account will be shipped immediately into your Gmail inbox, and you will no longer have wait on Gmail to retrieve them.

You're welcome.

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