My website hosting includes a bunch of free email accounts which I use heavily but I find the online email application (Horde) slow and clunky, and don’t want to be burdened with downloading my email. So instead I have set up a google mail (gmail.com) account which imports my hosted email into my gmail account using POP3.
This works really well, but there is a delay as google will only check my hosted email periodically.
How to improve this? When someone sends me an email their email system will lookup the MX record for my address. Check your MX records at mxtoolbox.com/
This tells the system where to deliver the email to. If I update that record to point to google then the this removes my hosting provider from the loop and my mail is delivered direct to google, removing the delay. To use this facility you need a Google Apps account.
Thankfully my hosting provider lets me do this via a web interface, hopefully yours will too but if not raise a change request. Click here for the details on the MX records.
Now this is set up I have set my Google Apps account to forward my email to my recular gmail account.
Now my email arrives in a flash, and on my Android phone too!