How to Auto-Forward Gmail Messages in Bulk [Video]

Gmail offers an easy mail forwarding option that lets you auto-forward incoming messages to another email address. You define a rule (or filter) and any incoming mail that matches the filter is automatically forwarded to another address.

There are however some limitations in Gmail’s auto-forwarding feature:

1. You cannot auto-forward old emails. For instance, if you have a bunch of old emails that you would like to send to your EverNote or Instapaper account for archiving, you’ll have to manually forward them one-by-one as auto-forward only works for new incoming emails.

2. You cannot auto-forward to a non-verified email address. When you set up auto-forward in Gmail, it sends a verification message to the other email address before you can forward messages to that account.

If you would like to auto-forward Gmail messages (including the older emails) to another email address in bulk, or if you would like to forward them to another address without confirming, Google Docs can help you overcome those limitations very easily.

The trick is simple. You set up a trigger in Google Docs that watches some of the labels in your Gmail Inbox and as soon as it finds a message, it auto-forwards it to a designated email address. You just have to set it once and it then runs in the background without requiring any manual input.

Create a copy of this Google Sheet in your Google Docs account and fill the columns A and B. You should put valid Gmail Label Names in column A and the corresponding auto-forward email address in column B.

Go to Tools –> Script Editor –> Triggers –> Current Script’s Trigger and Add a new Trigger. Set the Event as Time-Driven and choose either Minutes or Hours for the duration. If you want near-instant mail forwarding, set the timer to Every Minute.

Since you are running this Google Docs sheet for the first time, you’ll have to authorize it to access your Gmail account. Just follow the authorization prompts to grant Google Docs access to your Gmail.

That’s it. You can close your Google Docs sheet and it will magically forward your Gmail messages that are in particular labels. Once the message has been forwarded, the label will be removed automatically.

To quickly summarize, you set up one or more “watch” labels in Gmail and any emails that you add to these labels are automatically forward to the corresponding email addresses as you have specified in the Google Docs sheet.

This Google Docs based auto-forwarding method will work for both plain text emails as well as HTML mails that have attachments but there’s one limitation – the size of individual email messages that you are auto-forwarding should not exceed 20 KB. This is a requirement of the Google Apps Script service.

Also, mails forwarded through Google Docs will still count towards your Gmail’s daily sending limit which is around 500 messages per day.

Auto-Forward SMS and Missed Calls to your Email [Android]

You may wonder why would anyone want to forward text messages or missed call notifications to their email account when the cell phone is with them all the time? Won’t these messages add more noise to an overflowing email Inbox?

Not so. For instance, some of my friends work in a company where, for security reasons, they aren’t allowed to carry personal mobile phones inside though they do have regular phones at their desk and are allowed email access. They would therefore leave the phone at home but with auto-forwarding enabled, they’ll get an email alert as soon as someone sends them an SMS or calls on their cell during office hours.

Such a feature may also be handy for people who have recently switched to a different phone number and would like to keep track of all incoming calls and messages received on their previous phone but without having to carry it all the time.

The Android Market has dozens of apps that can bring the auto-forwarding feature to your mobile phone but the one that I like most is SMS2Gmail. It says “SMS” but the app can forward both SMS text messages and missed calls to your email address. You will get the complete message text in your email and the sender’s name as well provided that that number already exists in your phonebook.

It takes just one step to get it up and running. Launch the app, provide the credentials of your Gmail account and done. It needs the Google credentials in order to send email notifications but if that doesn’t make you too happy, just create another Gmail account and set it to auto-forward messages to your primary email account.

One more thing.

You turn on email notifications manually but in a situation where you have have forgotten the phone at home, or have misplaced it somewhere, you can remotely activate auto-forwarding by sending an SMS from any another phone to your phone.

The app lets you assign an Activation Keyword (see screenshot) and as soon as a text arrives with that keyword, the auto-forwards will be enabled automatically.

Also see: Backup your SMS Text Message to Gmail