How to manage more than one email account

Why have multiple email accounts?

Sorting between important business meeting invitations and personal appointments makes it challenging to prioritize—using separate email addresses makes separating your work from your personal life easier. Some people use multiple email addresses to separate different types of work or have a designated account just for subscriptions to protect their main account from advertisements and spam.

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Using multiple emails can also be a way to stay secure online. Most email accounts require a backup email address to recover your password and notify you about security breaches. When entering your contact information into websites for surveys or signing up for personal social media accounts, using an alternate email address ensures your information won’t lead back to your primary or work email.

What is a unified inbox?

A unified inbox allows you to combine multiple email accounts into one inbox, even if your email accounts use different email services. While you might use individual accounts when searching for a specific email, using a unified inbox to regularly check your emails makes it much less likely you’ll miss something important.

How to use one inbox for all your email accounts

If each of your email accounts use the same email service provider, like Outlook, you’ll be able to create a unified inbox without downloading anything. In Outlook, tap the Account icon and select All Account to open a unified inbox with all of the accounts you’re logged into. If your email accounts use different email service providers, you can still try out a unified inbox by looking into third-party email apps that allow you to add all of your inboxes in one view.

Another option to streamline your email accounts is to set up automatic forwarding on your secondary accounts to redirect messages to your primary inbox. If your main reason for having secondary accounts is to protect your privacy, forwarding can be a good option. However, it doesn’t allow you to organize your emails as easily as when using a unified inbox.

Tips for managing multiple email accounts

Whether you decide to use a unified inbox or not, these tips can help you organize and prioritize your emails.

• Turn off push notifications. Getting constant notifications from multiple inboxes distracts you and pulls you away from your other obligations. While it might seem like notifications would help you avoid missing important emails, it’s just as easy to miss a notification. By regularly checking your email accounts instead, you’ll know nothing has slipped through the cracks.
• Organize your emails with folders. Most email accounts have several functions, like folders and filters, to help you organize your messages. Filter messages and sort them into folders based on their topic or urgency level.
• Unsubscribe to unnecessary emails. Unsubscribe to unnecessary emails. With email signups required for creating online accounts, unnecessary newsletters and sales announcements can pile up in your inbox. Make space for the emails you actually want to read by unsubscribing each time you see one of these emails.
• Use spam filters. Most email accounts filter for spam so you don’t have to waste energy searching through advertisements and phishing emails every time you check your inbox. If you still have a problem, try adjusting your spam settings or designating specific email addresses always be sent to spam.
• Check your emails at the same time. Constantly looking at your emails makes it hard to focus on your actual work throughout the day. Increase productivity by setting specific times to check your accounts. Some email accounts might only need to be looked at once a day, but you’ll probably need to check your work email more frequently, like once every hour.

Whether you need to manage two email accounts or five, organization strategies will help you keep up with each of them. Don’t let your growing inbox overwhelm you—take the time to create an email game plan and avoid missing another email again.