Technology For Agents

If you are a user of Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, or any other software program to manage your emails and are concerned about backing up your data you should consider GMail as an archive tool.

Using GMail, you can effectively archive all your emails in case your main office computer goes downhill. You can also use it as an emergency “on the road” email program in case you can’t access your main computer to send emails.

If you are not archiving your emails, what happens when you have a system meltdown?

How It Works

In this particular case, let’s say “Suzie” has an office email account. Suzie is a Keller Williams Realty agent, so she is given an @KW.com email address, and the use of the KW webmail system. Suzie can also have all her emails from the @KW.com account name forwarded to any email address she’d like, which is what we are going to need to use GMail as your archive tool.

Set Up Your Gmail Account

First, we are going to need to have a gmail account to use for our archiving system. Google has thoughtfully made GMail a free program, and now anyone can sign up! Simply head over and sign up for gmail.

Begin Forwarding Your Emails

Now that your GMail account is setup, you are going to need to login to your agent administration tool to setup your email forwarding. Suzie, being a Keller Williams agent, will log into the Keller Williams Intranet, head to the “My Information” tab, click on the “My Email” link, then the “My Forwarding” link that opens in the submenu.

You are going to want to forward your emails to the GMail account we just setup. Many times this request takes some time to process, so be sure to let the expected wait time expire before continuing to the next step.

Test Your Forwarding

Head over to Gmail, login to your account, and send a test message to your original email account to make your emails are forwarding correctly. If they are, then you’ll receive an email in your GMail account moments later. If you do, you’re doing a great job so far!

If not, you may need to contact your email provider customer support to see why your emails are not forwarding correctly.

Setup POP Access in Gmail

At this point, we are now able to receive emails at the original address. All those emails are now being forwarded to GMail account, which will then be downloaded into your software program. When they download, GMail will automatically archive that email (not delete it), hence why I call this process “Using GMail As An Archive”.

In order to download your emails from GMail and into your local software program like Outlook and Thunderbird, you will need to enable POP access on your gmail account.

What is POP?

POP is a way to download emails from another account. According to Webopedia.com:

Short for Post Office Protocol, a protocol used to retrieve e-mail from a mail server.

To enable POP in Gmail, click on the settings link at the upper-right hand corner after logging into GMail. In the tabs near the top of this new window, you’ll want to click on the Forwarding and POP/IMAP link. This will bring you to the settings area for the POP access we need.

Bring your attention now down to the POP Download section, and select Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded). If you want to select to only allow the download of items received from this point forward, select the next option, Enable POP for mail that arrives from now on.

Next, make sure that the next option, “When messages are accessed with POP” that the archive GMail’s copy is selected.

At the bottom of this options screen, select to save to finalize your settings.

Setting Up Your Email Client

Now we are at the final step: Setting up your email client to download your emails from GMail. GMail realizes that many people use this wonderful system, so they’ve went ahead and created a guide for setting up your email client to download emails from GMail.

Once you’ve decided on your email client, head to the GMail Help Center for instructions on how to setup your email client for this next step.

You Are Done!

Did this seem like a tedious process? If so, I assure you you’ll thank me later. Now that you have a system in place that will archive all your old emails, you can rest assured knowing that if you ever lose access to your email client like Outlook or Thunderbird and can’t recover the information on your computer, you can still log in to GMail and access all your old emails and even send new ones.

It’s a processed I’ve used for years and haven’t look back! Now this is only one great archiving system that I’m aware of. What system do you use to archive all of your old emails?

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