Quick Tip: How to create a combined, unified email inbox on Windows Phone 7 Mango

Tweet

Article by shiftF    8 Comments

Firstly, this mini tutorial will only work if you have a Windows Phone 7 device running the latest beta of Mango. If you aren’t running Mango yet, you might want to check out this tutorial if you’re a student, or this other tutorial for non-students on how to get your WP7 updated to Mango! If you’d rather not update just yet – feel free to read on and learn about one of the cool new features coming in Mango this fall!

Anyway, I decided to make this quick tutorial because almost half the WP7 users I’ve talked to had no idea this feature even existed! And at least half of those people would have actually liked this hidden gem of a feature. BlackBerry smartphones have had this feature forever, while iDevices got in iOS 4 and Android got it in some version of 2.0. Good news for WP7 users – it’s coming in Mango.

If you don’t know what a combined inbox is – essentially it creates one “super-inbox” tile on your start screen that contains emails from all the email accounts you wish. In other words, if you have 3 different email accounts hooked up to your device (ex. Gmail, Hotmail, Work Exchange email), and you’d like to see all the latest emails together in one screen – then this tutorial will show you how to combine all those inboxes into one! Also important – if you only want to group some of your email accounts – you can do that as well as it’s totally up to you how many accounts you link.

Either way, it’s super easy to do – so here we go:

1. Open the inbox of any email account you have set up on your WP7 already.
2. Click the 3 dots to open the bottom menu. Then click on “Link Inboxes”
   
3. Choose which inbox you’d like to link together. Simply click on the inbox again to unlink it if you make a mistake.
4. Rename linked inbox if you wish… then hit back and enjoy your new combined email inbox!
   

Anddddddd that’s it! If you’d like to unlink inboxes – simply repeat the steps and choose to unlink in step 3 instead.