A feature about to be launched soon ? and maybe already has for some of you ? takes care of a highly requested feature and will make it even easier for users to switch to Gmail. It’s called Mail Fetcher, and it lets you check up to five different POP mail accounts right through your Gmail. This means you can now check accounts like your ISP address from within Gmail without setting up forwarding rules.

“Now Gmail can check for the mail you receive at your other email accounts. You can retrieve your mail (new and old) from up to five other email accounts and have them all in Gmail. Then you can even create a customized ‘From:’ address, which lets you send messages from Gmail, but have them look like they were sent from another one of your email accounts. Please note that you can only retrieve mail from accounts that have POP3 access enabled.” ? Gmail “What’s New” page

The idea isn’t new, Yahoo offers the service for their mail application and Hotmail used to offer it years ago, but has since removed that functionality. Google is relatively late to the game, but judging by the response, people don’t care. If you have the feature enabled already, let us know how it works by leaving a comment.