Gmail offers forwarding to one email at a time by default. Hereâs how we got around it using forwarding addresses and filters.
Producing Paradise is all about peering behind the magic curtain: weâre using this blog as a testing ground, and telling you how we make it work. Iâm going to explain how we hacked our Gmail setup so we could share the main Producing Paradise email address, without having to log into a new account to check for new mail. Because who has time for that?
A free Gmail address suited us because weâre all familiar with the platform, and it means we can login from anywhere, on any device. Itâs weareproducingparadise@gmail.com BTW, if you want to drop us a line đ
We also didnât need the email address to match our domain (like âhello@producingparadise.comâ). This is a side hustle after all, and hosted email costs money.
So hereâs what to do:
1. Create a Gmail account â the one you want to forward from
2. Log in and click the cog icon to get to the settings page
3. Go to âForwarding and POP/IMAPâ and click âAdd a forwarding addressâ
4. Add each of the forwarding addresses here â the ones you want to forward to
5. Youâll also need to verify each forwarding address before they can be used, to prove you own them
6. Once verified, go back to the âForwarding and POP/IMAPâ page and make sure it looks like this:
Noting:
- Forwarding is disabled â because weâre going to make it work using âFiltersâ
- POP and IMAP are disabled â because we donât want anything we do in our personal email account to affect the original
7. Finally, go to âFilters and Blocked Addressesâ and click âCreate a new filterâ
8. Filters are a way to search through emails, but in this case we want the filter to apply to all emails, so we put âTo: [main email address]â then âCreate filterâ
9. After that, you get to choose what happens to all filtered messages, so in this case: âForward itâ to the first forwarding address
10. Youâll need to repeat this step and create a new filter for each of the forwarding addresses, until it looks something like this:
Send an email to the original address to make sure itâs all doing what itâs supposed to.
The forwarded emails act as notifications, which can either be kept as a reminder of an action required (in your @Action folder, if youâre that way inclined) or deleted immediately (since they will still exist in the main Producing Paradise email account).
So far, this system is working for us! It took a bit of Googling and some annoying steps (like waiting for each person to verify their email address, since we werenât altogether when setting it up) but now itâs in place we all get the Producing Paradise emails sent to our personal accounts so weâll see them without having to log into a separate email account. And it made for another tidy little blog post, in the hope it may be helpful to someone in the future (…you, perhaps?).
