One thing I’ve learned over the last several years is this: virtually every technical problem I’ve encountered has likely been experienced by someone else and they’ve asked about it or discussed it online.
Case in point: Like many of you, I manage several email accounts within Gmail. If I receive an email from someone to my steve(at)iconnectdots.com account, when I reply it comes from that account when I use Gmail in a web browser on my computer, iPad or iPhone. Same thing if I receive a steve(at)minnov8.com email, replying to that person comes from that Minnov8 account…and so on and so on.
The problem comes with using the Apple Mail app in iPad or iPhone (a faster client than a Safari-based use of Gmail) and that I had to either setup EACH AND EVERY EMAIL ACCOUNT separately or generically reply to the sender from my @gmail.com account. The former was time consuming and clumsy to setup (and a real pain since I periodically change my Gmail password), the latter not terribly professional.
Yesterday my daughter bought a 32GB Wifi iPad for this college year (from a colleague for the amazing price of $350) and, since I don’t need the storage nearly as much as she does, I swapped her my 64GB for the 32GB. That necessitated re-setting my various email accounts and I thought, “I wonder if someone has figured out how to easily setup a single Gmail account on iPad where one can send from multiple Gmail-managed accounts?”
The answer was, “Of course someone else has wondered about this problem!”
Four minutes after entering the search query, “set up multiple gmail managed accounts on ipad” I found “Solved: Gmail, iPad, iPhone, and multiple from addresses” from a guy named Nick Cernis who writes a tumblog called “Modern Nerd.”
Nick laid out the solution, complete with screenshots, and it took me moments to get this setup and running on both my iPad and iPhone 4. I broke in to a grin as I saw how simple it was to send from any of my Gmail-managed email accounts, so now I’m on the hunt to locate a method to automagically insert the correct signature when one of those other email accounts are selected.
Friends, family and colleagues continually to tell me how amazing I am when they can ask me a question and I can pull the answer out of my brain or quickly discover it online. Partly this is due to my strength of input and learning (I constantly am in “seek mode” reading and storing tips, tricks, strategies and tactics) but mostly it’s due to the power of search and the collective input of people like Nick Cernis…those who take the time to solve problems, package up the answers and deliver this value online for the rest of us to discover and leverage.
Thanks Nick!

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