I decided to convert from Yahoo to Google, and this particular topic was a big problem. Read about my switch in the [cref moving-from-yahoo-to-google] Post.
This process was not nearly as simple as you might think. There are a lot of posts in Google Help about this that haven’t been resolved. I did get this to work.
Purpose
I wanted to have two email accounts in Google. One personal and one public. I want to use the public one for all the generic stuff you have to do online to sign up for things. I then wanted to be able to filter the emails and have be forwarded into my personal account. There, I wanted them filtered into specific labels.
Example: I sign up for an Amazon account with the email address public+shop@gmail.com. Any emails from Amazon will automatically be archived in my public account and forwarded to my personal account. In the personal account, this email is labeled “publicSHOP” and archived. In my personal account, it never shows up in my spam or inbox, but my label in the left column shows: “publicSHOP (1)”.
How to do this
1. Sign in under the public account and forward ALL mail to the personal account. (Go to Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Forward a copy of incoming mail to personal@gmail.com and Archive Gmail’s Copy.)
2. Decide on the emails you’re going to give out. Note that any email in the format some.name+some.extra@gmail.com will work. Example: If your email is steve.jobs@gmail.com, you could do steve.jobs+news@gmail.com and it will be delivered to your inbox. I made:
public+news@gmail.com
public+entertain@gmail.com
public+money@gmail.com
public+home@gmail.com
public+shop@gmail.com
public+travel@gmail.com … for some examples
3. Sign out of your public account and sign into personal. Go to Settings > Filters and Create a new filter.
4. In the “To:” field, type public+news@gmail.com. Note here that the original addressee is the To:, not your personal address. The forward doesn’t really do a forward like it would if you manually forwarded it. It retains the original settings.
5. Go the “Next Step” and enter your personal selections. I select “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)”, “Apply the Label – publicNEWS” and “Never Send It To Spam”.
6. Do this for all the categories you choose to give out.
7. Send a test email to public+news@gmail.com FROM AN OUTSIDE EMAIL ADDRESS. I only have the 2 gmail addresses, so I haven’t tried it from a 3rd gmail. I sent tests from my Yahoo email account.
Results of these steps
My test email from Yahoo is now archived in my public email. In my personal email, it is archived and shows up as a new email in my Label category “publicNEWS’. When I open the email, I see that it is from my Yahoo account and addressed to public+news@gmail.com. There is no obvious record that it was forwarded.
Beware: When I hit reply to this email, it will try to send it back to public+news. I haven’t tried to deal with this glitch yet, since this was created to be a repository for junk mail. It’s not an issue for me.
