How to forward emails from Gmail, how to use Gmail filters

You can have all of your emails from Gmail automatically forward to another account or set up filters to forward specific emails. This is handy if you primarily use Gmail for subscribing to newsletters and signing up for online accounts but only ever want to read certain emails. We’ll show you how to forward all emails sent to your Gmail inbox and also how to set up filters to forward only specific emails.

Login to Gmail and click the settings gear in the top right, click Settings and then the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Click ‘Add a forwarding address’ in the ‘Forwarding’ section and enter the email address you want to forward emails to. Google will now send a verification email to your forwarding address, open it and click the link to confirm.

Head back to Gmail and refresh the page to ensure that ‘Forward a copy of incoming mail’ is selected and your email is the one in the drop-down menu. Now select what you want Gmail to do when it forwards an email – you can keep a copy in Gmail, mark it as read, archive the email or delete it from Gmail. Click Save Changes to confirm the new settings.

If you only want to forward some emails or forward different emails to different accounts then you’ll need to set some filters in Gmail. There are two ways to create filters and we’ll explain both.

Open Gmail and look for the small down arrow in the search box. Click it and a window will appear where you can enter the criteria for your filter. Fill in all the necessary boxes then click the magnifying glass icon in the bottom left corner to see if the filter is working correctly. If it is click the small down arrow in the search box again to open the filter window and then click ‘Create filter with this search’. In the next box select ‘Forward it’ and then click ‘Create filter’.

You can also use specific emails to create filters. Open the email you want to use and click the More button then ‘Filter messages like these’. Fill in the relevant fields to create the filter. You can edit and delete filters by going to Settings and selecting e Filters tab.