Interoperability is one of those things that many companies avoid as if it were the plague, and they should really embrace it if they want to have a future in the market. With that detail on the radar, some users may already know about the possibility of linking accounts from services like Yahoo! Mail and Outlook to the official Gmail app, but the Mountain View giant decided to give this a more official profile under the name Gmailify.
For many years I have been receiving my Hotmail (now Outlook) emails through the Gmail interface. Setting up a POP3 forwarding process is less complicated than it seems, and very useful for those who prefer to unify several email accounts under a single inbox. However, there are some technical limitations, especially when moving everything to a mobile environment and the official Gmail for Android. Google enabled direct access to other email providers with its app in March of last year, but those accounts were left out of features like Gmail's integrated spam protection. Now, the story is different.
Yesterday, the official Gmail blog introduced Gmailify, a new feature that lets users with Yahoo! and Outlook/Hotmail accounts use them as if they were a real Gmail account. Spam filters, custom inbox organization, and even the so-called Google Now "cards" will be available for those external domains. The procedure is simple: open the Gmail app, go to settings, tap the external account, and choose "Link account". According to the official information, this option is available on Android 4.4 or higher, a detail that will likely leave many users out.
In summary, if you want to have all your accounts under the same environment, and that environment is Gmail, the Gmailify feature should help you. And if after trying it you decide it's better to keep everything separate, no problem: Gmailify is completely reversible.
