How do you auto-forward all IMAP mail?

[app103]

I have a group of IMAP email accounts. (4 of them to be exact)

How would I go about getting the new mail from all of them and forwarding it all to another email address so I can have everything in one inbox? (gmail)

The service I have my IMAP accounts with does not offer any type of automatic forwarding. Gmail doesn't offer automatic retrieval for IMAP, only POP.

I don't care if I have to run something to download the mail and then upload it again, as long as it can be done automatically, so I never have to go manually check those accounts ever again.

I want to be able to consolidate everything into one mailbox instead of logging into so many or using webmail + an email client to get all my mail. I would prefer to just use one gmail webmail account. I already have things set up in gmail to be able to reply and send mail as these IMAP accounts' email addresses. The only thing left is to be able to get the mail into my gmail inbox.

Does anybody have any creative ideas on how to go about doing this?

[JeffK]

app103, do you need a free solution?

[app103]

Yes, free is all I can afford right now. 

[Grorgy]

While ive never tried to do it, if you used thunderbird with the webmmail extension http://webmail.mozdev.org/index.html (this lets you download from these: Currently Yahoo, Hotmail, Lycos (Europe), MailDotCom, Gmail, Libero, and AOL domains are supported.

Then you could get thunderbird to send them back out using the appropriate IMAP account to gmail.

Worth a try perhaps

[Grorgy]

and its all free 

[app103]

I don't need any type of webmail extensions to get my mail from my IMAP accounts, or send mail from them. They will work in any email client that can handle IMAP.

The problem I have is automatically forwarding everything that comes in to another email address. I tried it with OE and it didn't work because the stuff from the IMAP accounts don't end up in the main inbox. They end up in 4 seperate IMAP folders (1 for each account), which each have their own inbox subfolder.

OE can't apply rules to those other inbox folders, just the main one, which my email never hits. I have even tried manually dragging & dropping them to the main inbox folder, and then applying rules, but it did nothing. No mail was sent out.

Does Thunderbird handle IMAP folders differently?

[Carol Haynes]

How does your mail get to the IMAP accounts (are they fixed email addresses that you must use or are they associated with you web hosting account?). If they are related to your webhosting account you could perhaps redirect the mail by changing the mail server you use.

Another method would be to use Yahoo mail which includes email forwarding. You could use the web based email as your IMAP style access from anywhere and have all your mail forwarded to one central mailbox which you can collect in your mail app via POP mail.

Works well for me - I have 4 Yahoo email address - 3 feed into the fourth - so I never have to look at those 3 at all - just the fourth which has all my mail. I then use POP to grab that mail into my mail client (you can choose to leave a copy of the mail on the Yahoo server when you download via POP if you want to keep you mail in both places).

Yahoo mail also has the advantage of providing "Address Guard" disposable addresses the hide your proper email address when you want to register somewhere but either don't want to receive emails from them (in which case you can delete the email address when you no longer want to receive mail on it) or monitor the source to see if they send out spam - works great and means you can limit access to your main account for websites that behave badly without screwing up all your other contacts.

[app103]

How does your mail get to the IMAP accounts (are they fixed email addresses that you must use or are they associated with you web hosting account?). If they are related to your webhosting account you could perhaps redirect the mail by changing the mail server you use.

Fixed email addresses. I can't change the mail server I use.

Another method would be to use Yahoo mail which includes email forwarding. You could use the web based email as your IMAP style access from anywhere and have all your mail forwarded to one central mailbox which you can collect in your mail app via POP mail.

Yahoo is not an option. These are email addresses that I have had for about 8 years. I can't just dump them in favor of something else, which is why I need to forward the mail.

Your ideas on how useful Yahoo can be, expresses my feelings towards gmail, and the reason why I want to forward this stuff to my gmail account if possible. (I use only the webmail though)

[Carol Haynes]

How does your mail get to the IMAP accounts (are they fixed email addresses that you must use or are they associated with you web hosting account?). If they are related to your webhosting account you could perhaps redirect the mail by changing the mail server you use.

Fixed email addresses. I can't change the mail server I use.

Are the email addresses based on your domain name or totally separate?

My domain name management company has the option of web forwarding so that I can redirect my emails anywhere I want.

If they are totally tied to a domain that you have no control over then I am not sure there is any easy way to do it if the company doesn't support forwarding.

There are a number of companies that will collect email from your email accounts and forward them to another account. I looked at this a while ago (before I had a domain name) but can't remember the company names I considered. They weren't free though.

One last thought is can you access this mail via a POP server as well as IMAP - in which case you can set up you gmail account to collect the email from your other accounts automatically. Just go to Settings link and the Accounts tab. You can then set up POP collection addresses. See http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=%67mail&hl=en_GB&answer=21288 for details.

[app103]

I have no control over the domain...can't set up any sort of forwarding there.

I have IMAP but no POP. Until Gmail supports fetching mail from IMAP accounts, it's not an option to let them handle it for me. I wish it was an option.

If there is some sort of email client that can handle IMAP, grab my mail, and forward it to another email address, and do this automatically through some sort of rules I can set up, this would be fine with me.

But I don't want to go trying a million email clients just to find out they work as ineffectively as OE. That's why I am asking here.

[Carol Haynes]

Sounds like what you need is some sort of server side script scheduled to run every few minutes with CRON that will monitor your IMAP accounts and forward any mail to your GMail account and delete the original!!

Don't know if such a thing exists though. How about a PHP coding snack?

I trawled through loads of email freeware/shareware dross looking for something suitable and the only IMAP forwarding software I could find would only forward to MS Exchange servers - which is not a lot of use unless you are secretly a corporation running Exchange!

It may be simpler to systematically change your email accounts (I know it is a PITA). Use your own domain name and then you will never need to change email address again!

[Grorgy]

talk about finding ways not to do the things i'm sposed to be doing lol ahhh well ive had fun

I used thunderbird and a thing called freepops http://www.freepops.org/ ; then set it up to find yahoo accts (it will let you do this with heaps of different web based emails)  so when thunderbird checked for mail it found it.

Set a filter to forward any mail addressed to me to be forwarded to gmail, and it worked.  Oh and the mail came into the main inbox tho it looks like you can set rules on any folder.

Hope this is of some assistance

[Carol Haynes]

Trouble with FreePOPs is that it doesn't appear to support the IMAP protocol - only HTTP based mail.

There are loads of tools that work for HTTP type email but very little for IMAP