(Credit: Stacey Zhu; Google)
Are you getting emails that need to go to a different inbox? Perhaps you have a new email address and need to forward everything from your old account, or maybe you regularly get messages meant for a family member or co-worker, and you'd like to auto-forward them to that person. No matter what the reason may be, we have good news for you: It's entirely possible to auto-forward messages in Gmail. In fact, there are two different ways to do it. You can set things up to forward all incoming messages, or you can create a filter that only forwards select messages. Keep reading to learn how.
Set Up a Forwarding Email
First, in Gmail, click the gear icon at top to Settings > See All Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
Under Forwarding click the Add a Forwarding Address button. Enter an address. Only ONE is allowed to be entered at a time. You'll have to verify you own the account, even using multi-factor authentication (MFA) if you have it turned on. You'll get a warning that a confirmation link went to the forwarding address for approval.
(Credit: Google)This way, you can't just spam some unsuspecting person's inbox with all of your junk mail. This is what the person/account on the receiving end will see.
(Credit: Google)Once approved, that email address should appear in the dropdown menu next to "Forward a copy of incoming mail to." If you check that off and select the email address, all of your incoming messages will then be shunted to the forwarding address. That's it. You can keep messages in the original email account's inbox unread, mark them as read, delete them, or archive them.
That's the nuclear option for when you're moving to a new email and don't want to shut down the old. If you don't want that, make sure you keep "Disable forwarding" checked off.
Setup Filtered Forwarding of Select Messages
If you have an inbox full of thousands of emails, you should start using filters to organize them. They're a great tool for automatically filing messages based on the sender, subject, keywords, or even message size and attachments, so they get labeled and archived.
To create a filter, open the Filters and Blocked Addresses tab and select the Create a new filter link. Easier still, select a message or a number of them (even from different senders) and click the three-dot menu at the top of Gmail. Select Filter Messages Like These. In the dialog box, confirm any other settings for the message you want to filter—you may want to label it, star it, delete it, etc.
Most important for our purposes: check off Forward it to: and pick an address. Then click Create Filter.
(Credit: Google)You can only choose one address in the filter setup. That means you'll have to create a second filter on the same message to forward it to multiple people. It's annoying, but it's easier than manually forwarding all the time.
Gmail Filter/Forwarding Caveats and Limits
This also works with Google Workspace email addresses in exactly the same way.
One thing it will not do is work with old messages. It only filters/forwards new messages as they arrive. If you want to forward your old messages to a different email address, you are better off backing up your email for access via an offline client like Thunderbird. If you just want them for posterity, download the full contents of your mailbox via Google Takeout.