How to tie your bluehost domain email address to gmail

These instructions will work with pretty much any host so you can probably substitute a step or two to make them work for your host also.  Also, if you find this post useful please put a link on your website or tweet my url: http://www.webwalkersolutions.com.  Thanks.

I’m going to assume a few things before beginning: that you already understand the benefits of piping your emails from bluehost over to Gmail and that you already have your gmail and bluehost email accounts setup. With that out of the way let’s get into the details of how to make this happen.

Let’s handle the Bluehost side first.

• Go into your cPanel and down down the to mail section. Click on email forwarding
• Click on Add Forwarder
• Next screen in the Address section, enter the address that you will be forwarding in the Address to Forward field
• In the next section Destination, make sure the Forward to email address radio button is selected and enter your gmail address here
• Click the Add Forwarder button
• I would send a test email to the address you’re forwarding now and make sure that it makes it.

Now let’s handle the Gmail side
This is going to allow you to send mail from your gmail inbox, through your bluehost mail server. This way it will maintain all of your domain headers.

• Once logged into gmail go into Settings (top right)
• Go to Accounts and Import
• In the Send mail as section click on the Send mail from another address button
• This will pop up a new window. Enter the name you’d like displayed to others when you send from this address as well as the address of the bluehost email account.
• Click the Specify a different “reply-to” address and enter your bluehost account email again. Just to be clear, each address should be the same.
• Click Next Step
• On this step you decide if you’re going to send through your SMTP (bluehost) account or not. We’re going the SMTP route to maintain a more professional appearance. Select “Send through yourdomain.com SMTP servers.
• If you’re not using bluehost here then you will probably need to go to your account to find this information.
• For Bluehost enter
• SMTP Server: box###.bluehost.com (you can get the number by going into your cpanel >> email >> and clicking on the “more” off to the right of  the email account >> picking configure client >> and copying the line next to Outgoing Mail Server: (SSL) etc..  just make it look like what is in italics above with the right box number.
• Username: enter the full bluehost email address (test@yourdomain.com)
• Password: email password
• Check always use a secure connection
• Submit the information
• The last step will send a verification email to your bluehost email account. Just take the code that comes in that email and enter it into the field on the right and click “Verify”

A few final points. You can choose which account you want to be your default sending account in the Settings >> Accounts and Import section. Just click “make default next to your new address if you’d rather always send from it. At any time you can choose which address to send from though and here’s how.

When you are composing a new message look up at the very top. What’s different is that now you have two accounts you can select who you want the “from” field to be. Choose either.. EASY!

That’s it! I would send a few test messages back and forth just to make sure everything is working easily but there’s nothing more to it. Expect maybe a one minute delay as emails move from gmail, through your smtp and to your recipient.