Last time I started a series of articles on collecting mail from several different mailboxes, created even on different services, into one main mailbox, which the user constantly monitors and it is easier for him to work only with him alone, rather than looking through all his mailboxes separately. Read more about the need to collect mail and about its implementation on the GMail service.
I am planning this series of articles so far for 3 articles. Today I'll talk about setting up mail collection in an equally well-known mail service - Yandex.
Collecting mail from other Yandex accounts is set up as easily as in other services.
The process of setting up mail collection in the Yandex.
To connect the ability to collect all mail in your Yandex mailbox from any of your accounts on the same or other mail services, first of all, log into your Yandex account, which will be the main one. It is in it that you will collect mail from other mailboxes.
Open the mail settings section and select “Collect mail from other mailboxes”.
You can collect mail from any mailboxes located on any mail services, and not only from your mails located on the same Yandex service!
The example for this article will show the process of collecting letters from Mail.ru mail.
Enter the full e-mail address from where you will collect letters and the password from it, and then click “Enable collector”.
If you specified the correct username and password for the mail, then in the next window a message will appear about a successful connection and here you can make some settings for collecting letters. For example, you can assign a label to the collected letters, and also display old forwarded letters as read. Mark the options you need and then enter the password from your second mail below again and click “Save Changes”. Mail will start collecting in 10 minutes.
In this settings window, you will not be able to select a separate folder for collecting letters from the connected mailbox. Initially, the Inbox folder will be listed and it will not change. This is due to the fact that initially mail is collected using the IMAP protocol and this protocol completely copies the folder structure from your connected mail.
If there are 2 options to force the collected mail to be sorted into folders:
Change the mail collection settings and install the POP3 protocol instead of IMAP (which is set initially);
Set up later filtering of letters, that is, create a condition under which the received mail will go to the folder you need, bypassing the "Inbox".
The second option, I think, is more preferable, especially for beginners, so as not to poke around in the settings for connecting to another mail.
Now all letters arriving at the mail you connected will be stacked in the current one, which is your main one. And then there is no need to go separately to the second mail to check for new letters in it.
How to view separately all messages collected from connected mail?
After adding mail, you will see a shortcut with its name on the left under the folders for letters. Example:
By clicking on this shortcut, you will see separately all letters from the connected mailbox.
How can I change the settings or disable the collection of mail from a specific mailbox?
If you need to change anything in the settings for collecting mail from an added mailbox, you can do it there in the Yandex mail settings, through the “Collecting mail from other mailboxes” section.
If you need to disable or re-enable mail collection from a certain connected box, click on the switch “On. / Off. " in the list of connected boxes.
If you need to open the mail collection settings, click on the name of the box, then click on the "Configure" link that appears. As a result, the same settings window will open as when connecting mail ().
Conclusion.
In conclusion, I want to note that usually there are no problems with collecting e-mail in the Yandex service and nothing needs to be configured in the second mail (which you connect). But there is a very capricious service called GMail :) When you connect it (not only to Yandex, but even to yourself), problems often arise and this is due to the increased security of this Google mail. No, I don’t argue, safety is good! But sometimes it reaches the level of insanity, for example, when Gmail blocks the connection to its own second GMail mailbox, and both are logged in from the same computer and the same IP :)) I will talk about such problems with connecting Google mails in a separate article.
This article will focus on what "mail from other mailboxes" and "collecting letters from other accounts" are. Reviews of postal services and comparisons.
As the functionality of mail services is updated, we will publish news at the end of this article.
Mail.ru mail service, Yandex and Google search engines have been offering very useful and necessary functionality for several years, which allows you to combine all other e-mail accounts in one mail. In other words, it is worth adding and configuring all your "mails" once, and it will be possible to manage them in one window without constantly entering a username and password.
Mail services offer us a huge storage space for all incoming emails, a user-friendly interface, good management functionality, and much more. To test the capabilities of the listed mail services, we will highlight three parameters to assess their work: 1) you need to manage various e-mail accounts, including from various services and sites, through one mail client; 2) have a personal signature and name for each mail; 3) delete letters from the servers of those mail accounts that have been added to mail, yandex or google mail.
Our task looks like this: 
So let's get started. We are the first to test the service from Mail.ru, which tells us: “You can collect mail from all your mailboxes into one mailbox on Mail.ru.
Configure collection of emails from any server using the IMAP or POP3 protocol. " To add external mail other than @mail, @inbox, @list, @bk, you need to have at least one mail that is already available on the listed servers from mail. In other words, first register mail-mail, and then add other mail accounts. The registration process for mail is simple, it makes no sense to describe it, but we will describe adding other e-mails to this mail account.
Next, you will be prompted to enter your login and password from any mailbox that you use, and within 3-5 minutes "Mail collector from mail" will create a folder with the name of the added mail next to the folders "incoming", "sent", "spam" and other.
In fact, the letter collector will start working within 10-15 minutes and will add all letters to the newly created folder from the mailbox you specified. All incoming letters for a new e-mail will come to this folder, it will also become possible to send letters from the attached mailbox. When creating a new letter, the "From" field will appear, in which you can select from which mailbox the letter will be sent.
The pluses of the Mail.ru mail service include the simplicity of adding and the ease of configuring other mailboxes, the absence of the need to specify various protocols (POP3, SMTP). This is very important because not every user knows what it is.
The disadvantages of Mail.ru are that it is impossible to assign a name and signature for each newly added mail (any new e-mail, except for the main one), that is, the name and signature of the main mail will be distributed to each address and that's it. Another big drawback is that when uploading messages to mail, there is no way to automatically delete original messages from the attached mailbox server. Why is it so important to delete messages from the server of the added mailbox? This will avoid filling up the attached mail, because external e-mail accounts are usually too small to store emails. For example, if the mail space in an external account is full, Mail.ru will not display any new letters until you enter the external mail interface and directly delete letters from there to free up space. Plus, we tie mail to Mail in the hope of getting a lot of storage space for our mail, which may be limited by hosting resources. Thus, despite the fact that Mail.ru offers an almost unlimited volume of mailbox, when adding mail from another domain zone (for example, [email protected]), your added e-mail resources will not increase in Mail.ru, but will continue to be limited by hosting resources (in our case, primer.ru resources).
The ability to add other mail to the Mail service did not suit our task on two points out of three, totaling one point.
True, Mail.ru has another way of adding external mail, or more precisely, connecting or logging into external mail. It looks like this:
This method is not suitable for our task, since it is not a mail collector, but a user mode that connects to mail and loads all folders and letters into the mail interface each time. But here it is possible to add a personal signature and name for each mail, it is possible to send letters from the configured mail. Deleting messages from loaded mailboxes does not work, because it is not a mail collector.
Important! Some users mistakenly think that if the letters are displayed in mail, then the mail from which the download occurred can be cleared. Note again that Mail.ru works as a mail viewer, and if you clear the mail, it will be deleted both in the main mailbox and in the mail.
The second test subject is Yandex with his mail collector. The tasks are similar: collect mail, assign a signature and name for each mail, and delete all mail from the added mailbox.
The Yandex mail collector is configured in a similar way, but if the mail is connected from some site, for example site.ru, then additional settings will need to be specified, see the screenshot.
The Mail service did this work for us, while Yandex offers to manually set all the settings from third-party mail. There is nothing complicated here: in the login field, enter the full name of the mail ( [email protected]), in the server field, enter only the domain (site.ru), it is better to leave all other settings by default, or change if you know what you are doing. After successfully adding mail, the following message will appear:
Unlike Mail collector, Yandex offers to choose whether to save the originals of letters in the added mailbox or not. In everything else, the Yandex mail collector works in a similar way to Mail.ru, it is possible to select a mailbox from which to send a letter. But Yandex has the same problem with the signature of letters: there is no way to set an individual name and signature for each added mailbox.
Judging by the navigation, there is a possibility of adding an individual signature for each mailbox, but in reality it does not work. We select the mail, write down the name and signature, click save. That's it, the signature is saved and works, but it is also saved for all other mailboxes, that is, by assigning a name and signature to one mailbox, you automatically change these parameters in all mails combined in Yandex. Even if you select any other box, the signature will now be the same everywhere.
In total, Yandex successfully coped with collecting and sorting mail, can delete originals of letters from the added mailbox, but cannot work with signatures! The mail collector from Yandex did not cope with our task and scores two points out of three.
I would like to note that, having "rummaged" in all three services for assembling letters, it seems that Mail has "slapped" its functionality in a hurry. Although it will satisfy most users, to be honest, Mail made a mail collector for show, to check out the competitive race. Everything works well and without failures, but the collector from Mail did not cope with our task. There are several ad units in the mail interface, but they do not interfere with working with letters.
As for Yandex, which created the letter collector a long time ago, it seems that this particular industry is not supported, because fixing such a simple functionality (the ability to add multiple signatures for mailboxes) should not be difficult for such a powerful search engine. Nevertheless, Yandex has another unique functionality that allows you to bind domains to their dns servers, and then create and configure mail. But such operations and settings require knowledge and time. And although there is nothing complicated there, in any case, it is not for the majority of users of the Russian Internet. Great advantage- no ads in the Yandex mail interface! Minus- Limit in the letter collector to 10 mailboxes.
The finalist and winner is a letter collector from Google, who coped with our task with a bang, despite even limit of 5 boxes
In Gmail, you can receive emails from multiple email accounts. Choose one of the options:
- Import all messages(old and new). Use this method if you are going to continue to receive letters to another address (including the Gmail address). There may be slight delays between the arrival of emails in a different mailbox and their import into Gmail.
- Retrieve only old messages... Suitable for those who recently switched to Gmail.
- Forward only new messages... Select this option if you want to instantly receive new messages from another mailbox.
How to import all emails
You can import all old and new emails from another account.
Note. Only letters can be transferred from another account. You cannot import folders and shortcuts.
Step 1. Change the settings in the external account
Yahoo, Outlook or another service
Make sure your email service has POP access. Then change the settings in Gmail.
Another Gmail account
Step 2. Change your Gmail settings
Server denied POP3 access error
- If you are using 2-Step Verification, enter the app password.
- If you use Gmail at your organization or school, in the POP Server field, enter mail.domain.com and select port 110.
- If you are using Google MX records in a corporate or school account, in the POP Server field, enter pop.gmail.com and select port 995.
- If you can't login, try enable access for untrusted applications... You may also need disable protection by code or word.
these tips.
Other errors
If you encounter other errors, click Show error details and do the following:
- If POP is disabled, enable it in the settings of the account from which you are importing letters.
- If POP is not available it is likely that your email service does not support this protocol. In this case, you can import old messages and enable automatic forwarding of new messages.
If you are having problems with the Mail Collector, use these tips.
If you only want to get old messages
If you recently switched to Gmail, transfer old emails from the mailbox that you used before.
We will forward emails from your old account to your new Gmail address within 30 days so that you can gradually notify your contacts of the change of address.
When you communicate on the Web for many months and years, you get a lot of letters, and this is hundreds of megabytes and gigabytes of correspondence and files. Often these are not just useful files, they can be used to recall and restore milestones in life. This data is more valuable than the contents of a local computer disk.
Sometimes the task arises to switch to a new and more convenient mail system, but the accumulated archives of letters interfere. Throw them in the same place? It's a pity. Passwords are forgotten. It happens that mobile numbers and email addresses entered to restore them are lost. One day you can lose your archives forever. Download to local hard drive? To rewrite to a disc or a USB flash drive? But they are unreliable: they break, get lost, deteriorate.
The most logical solution is to import the mail archive into a new mailbox. But it is not enough to do this once, because important letters may continue to arrive in the old mailbox. You can set up unconditional redirection of all incoming mail to another address, and from a technical point of view, this is the most preferred option. But we are not robots, and it is not always convenient to use a technically economical solution.
For a long time, the only way to transfer an archive of mail between mail systems with constant background synchronization of new messages was the POP3 protocol. The ability to collect mail from external POP3 servers is implemented everywhere and well. Anyway, as good as the protocol allows, and it has a lot of unpleasant limitations.
POP3 traces its history back to 1984, when Joyce Reynolds, an associate of the Institute of Informatics at the University of Southern California, published RFC 918 - a proposal for a standard protocol for receiving email (POP - Post Office Protocol). Four years later, the third edition of the POP protocol appeared, and the current, modern version of the POP3 standard was published in the spring of 1996, almost 17 years ago.
An important principle of POP3 is to optimize for short connections to the mail server in conditions of expensive and slow connections. Initially, within the framework of each connection, it was supposed to download all letters from the mailbox to a local disk, and then clear the entire contents of the mailbox. This is how your mailbox for letters and newspapers works in the entrance of an apartment building. The first version of POP didn't even have commands to read individual emails, only to completely unload everything.
It’s hard to imagine now that emails weren’t stored on servers. They were downloaded to the local computer at the earliest opportunity and read, sorted by addressees, topics and importance locally.
Interestingly, the POP2 protocol provided for the ability to work with multiple folders on the server, but it turned out to be unclaimed, and the distribution protocol itself was not received. Therefore, in POP3, the FOLD command, which implemented this feature, was removed. POP2 is ahead of its time.
Now in POP3 there is no way to download a folder structure from the server, only a "flat" list of letters, consisting, as a rule, either of incoming letters or of a grouping of user folders. The read and importance flags cannot be taken into account. Despite these limitations, the protocol is still widely used, mainly due to its simplicity and very wide support in any device.
There have been many attempts to improve POP3, but none have been as successful as the IMAP protocol, which has evolved almost in parallel since 1985. The history of IMAP is also quite interesting. For example, the first implementation was in Lisp, and its legacy is forever in the protocol as S-expressions that encode complex server responses such as BODYSTRUCTURE.
The author and ideologist of IMAP, Mark Crispin, laid down in it the principle of permanent storage of letters on the mail server. IMAP turned out to be one of the earliest cloud-based Internet protocols designed to make local storage on a personal computer unreliable. In addition, a person may have several personal computers and other terminals for working with mail - basic things for us today.
The latest version of IMAP, 4rev1, is described in RFC 3501, released in 2003. Despite its apparent age, the protocol came to life thanks to the mechanism of extensions provided in the early stages. This mechanism, of course, is also not without drawbacks, but nevertheless, it allowed various people to release more than fifty public extensions, many of which were recently developed and found widespread use.
A modern mail system without support for IMAP access is nonsense. For several years, Yandex.Mail has been supporting IMAP as a server for running such popular client programs as Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, as well as numerous mobile clients. By the way, it is thanks to smartphones that IMAP has received the second wave of development. If on personal computers for a long time the overwhelming majority of users have made a choice in favor of a web interface for their mail, then with mobile devices the situation is not at all the same. Fast and beautiful IMAP clients, for example in iOS, are forcing to redefine the approach to IMAP as the choice of exclusively professional and "advanced" users.
Recently Yandex.Mail has also added the function of an IMAP client - a collector of mail from external servers via IMAP - in addition to a POP3 collector.
The function requires almost no configuration and is designed to run in the background after the first start. When collecting mail via IMAP, due to the features of the protocol described above, you will see the folder structure in your mailbox that you are used to when using the previous mail system. All read emails will remain read, and unread emails will remain unread.
You can enable collection with folders in Yandex.Mail from all mail systems that support the IMAP protocol. The protocol is not simple, each implementation of the IMAP server has its own quirks, and it was important for us, first of all, to handle the most massive version of the transition from old mail to new one.
As before, in addition to the letters themselves, contacts are imported from the address books of the most common mail services.
The IMAP protocol is noticeably more complicated than POP3, both in terms of a set of features and commands, and in some basic principles of operation. For example, IMAP uses tagging of client commands and server responses to those commands, which allows the server to respond to commands in no particular order.
Each command must be preceded by some identifier - a tag, which will then be used by the server when generating a response to this command. This allows the "conversation" between the client and the server to be absolutely asynchronous - the server has the right to respond to the client's commands in any order, since tags allow one to unambiguously match the response to a previously given command. Moreover, the server can execute such commands at the same time, speeding up the speed of working with mail, and Yandex.Mail knows how to use this. At the same time, this requires a special approach to programming both the client and the server. If you remember the sequence numbers mechanism in TCP in this place, then write yourself +1 in geek cred :)
To implement the IMAP collector inside Yandex.Mail, we used our asynchronous framework for writing any high-performance network services called yplatform. It is currently closed source, although we are considering publishing it. Follow the news.
Go to Yandex.Mail, set up an IMAP collector, and you can always find any old email. Yes, something, but Yandex knows how to search.
I continue a series of articles about the function of collecting mail to one main e-mail box from any other located on any mail services. In the last article, we talked about setting up mail collection on the Yandex service, which is as easy as shelling pears. And in this article I will talk about how to do the same in another, no less popular service today - Mail.ru, where many still keep their main e-mail box, despite the fact that, for example, the GMail service has clear advantages (I have described setting up mail collection in Gmail). But as they say, to each his own and sometimes it's just a matter of habit :)
Setting up mail collection in the Mail.ru service is as easy as, for example, on Yandex. Just a few simple steps and everything will be ready, mail will start flowing from the mailboxes you connected to one, on Mail.
The process of setting up mail collection in the Mail.ru service
First of all, log into your account on Mail, where you will collect mail from other e-mail boxes and open the "Letters" section (the mail is located there).
Now you need to go to the mail settings. To do this, click the "More" button at the top and select "Settings".
You can also open the settings by clicking in the upper right corner on your email address and then selecting “Mail Settings”.
Then go to the "Mail from other mailboxes" section.
The first connection window of the second e-mail box will open.
Let me remind you that the second e-mail box from which you want to collect letters can be located on any service, not just Mail!
In the example for this article, we will consider connecting a mailbox located on the Yandex.
In this window, you need to specify the username and password for the mail that you are connecting. If the mailbox you connect is located on one of the services listed below, then click the appropriate button at the top, enter the full address of the connected mail below and click “Add mailbox”:
If the mailbox that you want to connect is located on some other service (not from the list above), then click the "Other mail" button at the top, after which you need to enter the full address of the connected mail, the password from it and click "Add mailbox".
If you have not yet entered your second mail in this browser, which you are connecting, then in the next window you will need to enter your username and password from it. Example:
After that, click "Allow" (you allow mail on Mail.ru to use some of the data of the connected second mail).
If everything went well, you will receive a message that the collector has been added. Now you need to choose which folder to collect mail: in a specially created folder by the name of the mail you connected or in the inbox. It's up to you to decide, but, in my opinion, it is more convenient when mail collected from another mailbox goes to a separate folder. One way or another, then this can be configured by filtering letters.
The option “Apply filters to received emails” means that all filters that you have already configured in the main mail on Mail will also apply to mail received from the connected mailbox. Disable or not is up to you.
That's it, the letter collector is set up! Now, within a few minutes (sometimes the process is delayed if there are a lot of letters on the connected mail), mail from the second mailbox will begin to flow into your main one.
In this way, you can connect as many mails as you like to collect.
How to separately see all letters from the connected mail?
You can look at the letters separately if, when setting up mail collection in Mail, you indicated that letters should be collected in a separate folder with the name of the connected mailbox. In this case, open this folder and you will see all the letters you need. Example:
If you did not immediately configure the receipt of letters in a separate folder, you can configure it at any time by opening the created collector (more on this below).
Configuring the created letter collector, disabling and enabling it
Sometimes you may need to make changes to the settings of the mail collector you created in Mail, and also disable it or enable it again.
This can be done in the same section “Settings” - “Mail from other mailboxes”, where you originally created your mail collector.
Here you will see the generated collector. If you want to turn it off or on again, click on the corresponding switch. If you need to open the collector settings, click "Change".
And the same settings for the letter collector will open, as at the stage of its creation (see).
