linking emails

[chris]

in outlook 2007 is there a way to link my cogeco email and hotmail email to
all be recieved in one email?

 

[VanguardLH]

in outlook 2007 is there a way to link my cogeco email and hotmail email to
all be recieved in one email?

So you want Outlook to monitor 2 accounts? Or you want Outlook to monitor
only 1 account to which another account deposits its e-mails, too? No one
knows what you mean by "link" so everyone has to guess.

Which account(s) have an option to forward (push) e-mails to another account
(that is on a different domain)? Which account(s) have an option to poll
(yank) e-mails from another account (that is on a different domain)? If you
want the mail servers to be forwarding or pulling e-mails from other
accounts then what you can do depends on what forwarding/polling functions
are included in your e-mail accounts.

You never identified the target account (the one account) from which you
want to retrieve all your e-mails. You want all e-mails to go to your
Cogeco account or to your Hotmail account?

For forwarding, Hotmail says "You can forward your mail to one other e-mail
address that ends in hotmail.com, msn.com, live.com, or is part of Windows
Live Custom Domains." So with Hotmail, you can only forward to other e-mail
accounts managed by Microsoft. That won't let you forward your Hotmail
e-mails to your Cogeco account.

Hotmail will let you receive from off-domain accounts, like Cogeco, except
it isn't automatic. You add the other accounts and then do a manual
retrieve to get any e-mails from those other accounts. That means you have
to use their webmail interface. Since you are asking for help in an Outlook
newsgroup then presumably you aren't interested in getting stuck using a
webmail client to manually drag e-mails into your Hotmail account. So
Hotmail won't do what you want as a "collector" account.

As far as what Cogeco will do regarding forwarding (so you can push your
e-mails to your Hotmail account) or polling (so you can yank your Hotmail
e-mails into your Cogeco account), that is something you'll have to find out
from them. Go read their web help pages or contact them for help on what
forwarding or polling features they include in whatever type of e-mail
account you have with them (since personal- and business-class accounts will
have different features).

Be aware that if you are using a free Hotmail account that it will expire if
left idle too long. Idleness is measured by logins. You must login to your
Hotmail account to keep it from being idle. Forwarding e-mails from your
Cogeco account into your Hotmail account does NOT perform a login. So your
Hotmail account would eventually idle out and get expunged because you
haven't logged in for an excessively long time. If using a freebie Hotmail
account, you want to *poll* that account. Since Hotmail has POP access, you
want your Cogeco account to poll your Hotmail account. Polling requires
logging in (which means you have to give your Hotmail login credentials to
your Cogenco account's setup) and that would keep your freebie Hotmail
account from idle expiring. If you paid for your Hotmail account then you
don't need to be concerned about it idling out and expiring.

So check if your Cogeco account allows you to poll (retrieve) other
accounts. You would then have it poll your Hotmail account which must login
and keeps your freebie Hotmail account from expiring. If your Cogeco
account doesn't let you poll off-domain accounts then you could always use
Gmail as a collector account for both your Cogeco and Hotmail accounts.

Each Gmail account lets you specify up to 5 other e-mail accounts to poll
via POP. By reserving one of those 5 slots for another Gmail account, you
can even chain together multiple Gmail accounts if you have more than 5
other-domain accounts to poll. By using Gmail as a collector account, you
also make use of Google's very good spam filtering on inbound e-mails. That
is, you would include Gmail's spam filtering in addition to any spam
filtering employed at the source mail hosts for your other accounts.
Gmail's spam filter cannot be turned off. With Gmail polling other account,
you can poll just that Gmail collector account using either POP or IMAP
using your local e-mail client. A caveat with using Gmail as a collector
account (where it polls other accounts) is how often Gmail will poll your
other accounts. The minimum polling interval is 5 minutes and the maximum
is 1 hour. You don't get to set the interval. Gmail will increase the
polling interval when it finds no e-mails in a polled account. The polling
interval starts at 5 minutes but will increase to 1 hour maximum for
accounts that are empty. Once it finds an e-mail in a previous empty
account, the polling interval gets reset to 5 minutes. So if you have a
mostly empty e-mail account that is getting polled by Gmail as the collector
account, it could be up to an hour before the other-account e-mail shows up
in your Gmail account to then retrieve using your local e-mail client. Say
you register for a forum which sends you a confirmation e-mail before you
can start posting in their forum. If that confirmation e-mail gets sent to
your non-Gmail account, it could be an hour before Gmail decides to poll
that other account. You could, of course, when expecting an immediate
e-mail to the other account go use the webmail interface to that other
account to see it immediately, or go into your Gmail account's settings and
have it do a poll now.