How to set up forwarding for Gmail - step-by-step guide

Forwarding an email means sending incoming messages to a different email account.

Sometimes, the reason for forwarding messages is that you have a new email but still want to receive messages sent to the old account.

Alternatively, you may want to share incoming emails with a third party.

Whatever the reason, we’ll show you how to set up email forwarding in Gmail below. ⬇️

Forwarding a single message 📩

This one’s easy.

You probably know how it works.

Step 1: Go to the email you want to forward and click on the three vertical dots in the upper right corner to open the email menu.

Step 2: In the menu, click on the Forward option you see in the image below:

Step 3: On the next screen, add the email address(es) you want to forward the email to.

Step 4: Now click send and you’re done!

Automatic email forwarding

Forwarding a single message may be just what we need sometimes.

However, other times, we want to forward all messages to a new email account.

This is also easy to accomplish. Just follow the steps below:

Step 1: In your Gmail account, click on the settings button.

Step 2: Next, click “See all settings” just below the settings button.

Step 3: Now click on “Forwarding and POP/IMAP,” as seen in the image below:

Step 4: Next, hit the Add a forwarding address button.

Step 5: Enter the email address to which you want to forward your messages.

Step 6: Click next, then proceed, and finally, OK.

Step 7: Now go to the email address that you entered in step 5, and verify the email by clicking on the link in the message Google sent you.

Step 8: Go back to the settings page in step 3, i.e., the email account you want to forward messages from and refresh the page.

Step 9: Return to the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.

Step 10: Select “Forward a copy of incoming mail to” and choose what should happen with the Gmail copy of your emails. Google recommends: Keep Gmail's copy in the Inbox.

Step 11: Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Save changes.”

And now you are done!

Forward only certain messages

A really cool Gmail feature is that you can forward specific messages only.

How?

By first setting up a filter for these messages.

If you only want to forward emails coming from a specific email address, you can follow these steps:

Step 1: Go through steps 1 to 7 of the process to set up automatic email forwarding. ⬆️

Step 2: In Gmail, enter the email address in the search bar and click the “Show search options” button.

Step 3: Click on “Create filter”

Step 4: Click on “Forward it” and select the email address to forward these messages to.

The above example is to forward emails coming from a specific sender.

However, you can use any filter you want and forward these messages.

If you only want to forward emails with a specific keyword in the title, you can do so too.