Non-Gmail email accounts have been supported by the Gmail app for about a year now, although they never received all of Gmail’s exclusive features until now that is. A new feature, called Gmailify, has just been released to give email accounts from other providers the ability to use Gmail capabilities like its inbox sorting, spam protection and Google Now integrations among others within the Gmail app for Android.
If you’ve had an email address for a long time, changing it is just as much of a hassle like switching to a new phone number, so if all you wanted was Gmail’s features, you can keep that address and add it to the Gmail app.
Right now, Gmailify supports Microsoft’s Hotmail/Outlook and Yahoo email accounts but Google does plan to add support for more email providers in the future. What this new feature provides, is to allow you to manage your non-Gmail email accounts as if they would be hosted on Google’s servers.
Those who already have other email accounts added to the Gmail app need to enable the ‘Gmailify’ feature by signing in once more into your external accounts and selecting the ‘enable Gmailify’ option. Also, this means you need to link your non-Gmail accounts to the Gmail app which can be done in the app’s Settings by choosing the non-Gmail account and then selecting the ‘Link Account’ option.
Furthermore, Gmailify is supposed to work with Gmail on the web as well and you can unlink your accounts should you change your mind at some point.
A ‘gmailified’ email account will benefit from all of Gmail’s features: this means spam protection, Inbox organization ( different categories like Updates, Social, and Promotions), the search function including its advanced operators, mobile notifications and Google Now integration.
Lately, email providers have been trying to lure us in by unlocking some of their exclusive features to our other email accounts and it’s not just Google. Before last year ended, Yahoo added the ability to use their password-free login and “smart” contacts for email addresses from other providers. Furthermore, Outlook offers an import option to help former Gmail users get started.
Gmailify was designed to be easily disabled should you want to. You should find the option in the settings of the Gmail app in the “Link account” section. Nevertheless, if you don’t see it yet, you might need to wait for a few more days for the update to roll out to everyone.
If your Gmail app doesn’t have the ‘Gmailify’ option yet, you can see it in action in Google’s short presentation video:
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