Automatically forward email from Gmail to Yahoo

Over at ManageMyLife.com a reader asked how to forward email from Gmail to Yahoo.

To forward email from Gmail to Yahoo (or anywhere else) you have to access your Gmail mail settings.

A link to this can be found at the top-right of your Gmail or Google Apps account. If you see a “Gear” icon next to your name, click it to reveal the “Mail settings” in the drop-down.

An older layout showed settings in a list which went across the top of the page. This is still in use for Google Apps accounts:

Whichever way you get there, the next screen will look like this, showing you several “tabs” of different settings, you want the one for “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”:

If your Yahoo address is not already know to Gmail, you will have to add it.

Check the drop-down list next to “Forward a copy of incoming mail to” and look for your Yahoo address. If it isn’t there, click the button “Add a forwarding address”:

Enter your Yahoo email address. You will be sent a confirmation code. Enter it in the “verify” field which will appear after you have added the new address.

Tell Gmail to forward all new mail to Yahoo:

Once you have verified it, you can choose “Forward a copy of incoming mail to” (and then select the Yahoo address in the drop-down box) and then you have to decide what you want to do with the copy at Gmail. You can:

1. keep Gmail copy in the Inbox
2. mark Gmail’s copy as read
3. archive Gmail’s copy
4. delete Gmail’s copy

Choose #1 if you want Gmail to ignore the fact that you are forwarding your mail to Yahoo and continue to act normally.

Choose #3 if you don’t want to see messages that you have forwarded in Gmail’s Inbox.

Choose #4 if you want to delete them immediately.

My recommendation is to choose #2, which leaves the messages in Gmail’s Inbox, but marks them as “read” so you don’t end up seeing the same message twice. My reasoning for this is that if you ever forget that you are forwarding your email to Yahoo or if something goes wrong with it, it’s easier to see that new messages have been arriving.

So in the end it should look like this:

Note that Gmail may not forward a copy of a message from your Yahoo account back to your Yahoo account. This is a safety precaution to avoid “mail loops” which are very bad. So you may need to have someone else send you a message at your Gmail account to see if it is forwarded to your Yahoo account.

Also note that this will only apply to new email that arrives after you enable forwarding. Existing mail will not be forwarded.

1. luoma posted this