If you’re like me, you probably have more than one Gmail account. After all, spam is still prevalent these days (never could totally count on Gmail’s spam filters much!), and it pays to have different addresses for various purposes, with varying levels of privacy. For instance, you can have one Gmail account for your personal email, and you never give out the address to just anyone. Then you can have those generic accounts for signing into mailing lists and egroups. Then you can have another one available to the public (like on your blog or MySpace profiles). However, sometimes you would like to be able to check these simultaneously.

One solution would be to use our popular universal Gmail account tip a while back. It’s simple: You use one single account as your “main” gmail account, and have the others forward to that account. You then set up “send from” addresses so it can appear as if you’re sending from different email addresses. If you want to keep your Gmail inbox uncluttered, you can set up filters so only your personal emails are labeled to appear on Inbox (with the rest going straight to Archive).

However sometimes that doesn’t work as smoothly. With some email clients, your actual email address still appears. Say, if you’re sending from emailaddress2@gmail.com but using the emailaddress1@gmail.com account, your mail will appear as “sent from” emailaddress2@gmail.com on behalf of emailaddress1@gmail.com. Not cool.

Of course you can always just open up different Gmail sessions on separate browsers, like Firefox and IE on a PC. Or Firefox and Safari on the Mac. You can even throw in a couple of other browsers, like Opera, etc. But then that beats the purpose of using tabs, which is, to many, now an essential aspect of browser technology.

Here’s one tip I got from Lifespy. Use the Firefox IE Tab plugin.

This lets you fire up an IE core within Firefox tabs. So you can actually run two instances of Gmail on a single Firefox window. One’s in a native Firefox tab, and the other one in an IE-within-Firefox tab.

Of course, this is just for those times when you really need to keep the “send from” clean of any “sent in behalf of” messages. In other cases, I would rather use only one single Gmail session.

Image credit: lifespy.com