Hack: How to Connect Yahoo Mail to Flow-e Through Gmail
It is with great sadness that we announce the discontinuation of Flow-e for Gmail. As of 1st January 2020, Flow-e for Gmail will stop working. Learn More.
As I am setting up my Mailshake account, they ask me to connect an email account to proceed. Okay. Sure.
Then I’m reading “Mailshake requires a Google account, but by setting up an alias, you can send from most any email provider.”
Crap. Our email provider is not Google. And I just spent $29 bucks from my marketing budget. Now I’m teeth grinding.
The grinding stops, as I see that they have a pretty detailed explanatory video on how to add an alias to the connected Google account.
Wait. Aliases? Brilliant.
No, really, it’s brilliant as an idea strikes me. The day before I’ve sent this update to our users, announcing a brand-new alias-related setting:
And I am thinking. If anyone can set an alias in their Google account for almost any other email provider, we can use this workaround for the Flow-e users who previously asked if they can connect non-Gmail/Office365 accounts to Flow-e.
These are the best $29 bucks spent ever! Thank you Mailshake!
Now let’s see how to execute the setup, step-by-step.
1) Create a new Google account
Now you need to create a new Google account for this setup. You can use an old one, but since you will receive emails from the email you will set as an alias in your Gmail account, it is best to separate them in a new inbox.
The first thing you need to do is to go to your Yahoo mail account security preferences to enable access to “Less Secure Apps” for my Yahoo account (otherwise, you won’t be able to connect it to Gmail).
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2) Once you’ve done this, you may proceed with the set-up. Watch the video below.
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3) Now go to your Flow-e account, and if you haven’t yet connected your Gmail account, please do so.
4) Now let’s test if the integration works
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I will quickly explain what you see. I have sent an email from mila[at]flow-e.com to miladaflow[at]yahoo.com. Then I’ve checked my Gmail account connected with miladaflow[at]yahoo.com (this is the alias). You can see that I have received the full communication and I was able to reply from my Gmail account as miladaflow[at]yahoo.com.
So, yes, everything seems to work fine. One thing I would like to mention is that emails will arrive with a slight delay.
So I haven’t tried with any other email provider, but if there aren’t any technical blockers, I think that this hack will work for most of the other email providers.
