Update: Consider these directions outdated. This was originally written before IMAP was released for Gmail. After extensive testing my solution below didn’t work all that well in some situations. I’m now using “Google Apps for your Domain” and running all my mail through Gmail. That seems to work quite well.
You can use Gmail and your IMAP personal domain email* without resorting to automatic forwarding.
About 3 years ago I switched to using IMAP instead of POP for my personal domain email and have loved it ever since. The main benefit of IMAP is that all your folders and emails are stored on the server instead of your local machine. This means that you can use multiple computers or change email clients without having to go through the tedious process of exporting and importing all your old emails. I also prefer using desktop mail clients to that of the online mail clients I have come across.
To my dismay my employer recently decided to block the ports for IMAP and POP3. After using my webhost’s particularly horrid webmail for a couple weeks, I decided to take a look at how I could use Gmail to check my personal mail at work while still using my desktop email client at home. There are a few other ways out there: to do this but none of them were to my particular liking. By using a creative series of connections through POP3 and IMAP I’ve found a solution that seems to work quite well. The added bonus is that by running my personal email through Gmail it gets run through Google’s spam filters. I used to get about 50 spam emails a day in my inbox, now 2 weeks later, I haven’t received a single one.
Without further ado, the solution.
Set up POP3 access to your personal account through Gmail.
In Gmail go to “Settings” → “Accounts” and under “Get mail from other accounts:” select “add another mail account”.
Follow the steps to enter your personal domain email POP3 information.
Make sure to uncheck “Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server”.
The reason for this is, as you will see in a later step, that you don’t want to download your personal domain email from your inbox into Google and through your desktop mail client. You will get duplicate messages that way.
Save your changes.
Now you have Google pulling messages from your personal domain email into Gmail.
Enable POP access for your Gmail Account.
To prepare for using your desktop client to access your Gmail account you will enable POP access
Again in Gmail go to “Settings” → “Forwarding and POP” and under “POP Download:” select “Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on”. Also select “When messages are accessed with POP: Archive Gmail’s copy”.
Make note of the configuration information for your desktop email client and save your changes.
Configuring your desktop client.
I prefer Apple’s Mail client so I’ll be using that here but all mail clients are pretty similar.
Add the IMAP information for your personal email account.
Under “Advanced” settings uncheck “Include when automatically checking for new mail”.
Again, this is so you don’t get your new email twice, once from your personal email and once through your Gmail account which already contains your personal email.
Add the POP information for your Gmail account.
Under “Advanced settings check the box for “Remove copy from server after retrieving a message:” and set it to “When moved from Inbox”.
Based on a previous setting above, Gmail already archives its online copy of your email once it is accessed through your desktop client so you just want to make sure that there is no copy left in your inbox online once you move the message out of your desktop client inbox.
Create any folders in your desktop client to suit your needs.
These folders are IMAP folders so they are stored on your personal domain email server. Now when you move mail from your desktop mail client’s inbox to one of these folders you will always have it available. The added bonus is that all your email is also archived online in your Gmail account.
With this set up you now have all your email going through Gmail but you can still use your personal domain email account for storing your archives in the folders you like. If you ever decide to stop using Gmail all you have to do is delete your domain email account from Gmail and set your desktop client to check it automatically again.
* Personal domain email in this post refers to your domain email, username@mydomain.com, as opposed to your Gmail email, username@gmail.com.