we share an email address, how to copy each other on outgoing mail?

September 26, 2018 7:15 PM

For load-balancing, situational awareness, and auditability, my wife and I made a shared gmail account which we give to people who need to contact our household in general. For example, the utility company, the landlord, the school.. It's working well for incoming mail, but we need to cc the shared account on every outgoing message manually. Is there any way to automatically cc the shared account when replying from the shared account? This is gmail, if it matters.

Please don't tell me to configure exim.

posted by meaty shoe puppet to Technology (13 answers total)

I think I am fundamentally misunderstanding what you are trying to achieve here, because the impression I get is that you want to send an email from [e-mail] while also cc'ing [e-mail]. This is what Sent Items is for.
posted by turbid dahlia at 7:22 PM on September 26, 2018 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Sorry, my description was incomplete:

1. The shared account forward to both our personal accounts.
2. Either of our personal accounts can send mail "as" the shared account.
3. When we do so, the sent copy stays with the one personal account.

We want the other personal account to see what has been written "as" the shared account.

It is important that the email look to the recipient as if it were coming from the shared account. We've found that if we reply from the personal account, the recipient tends to start talking directly to that account, cutting the shared account and the other personal account out of the loop.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 7:34 PM on September 26, 2018

Response by poster: Also, we don't want to read the shared account's email by logging into the shared account, because that adds friction to the whole process.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 7:35 PM on September 26, 2018

If you set your default reply action to "reply all," it should include the sender email address as well.
posted by selene_sophia at 7:41 PM on September 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

You want the "Check Mail from Other Accounts" setting, on the accounts and import page, for checking your mail in from the shared account in your own gmail account, and then the "Send Mail As" option on that same page.

That should let you check all of the shared account's emails as if they were your own, and when you reply, it should default to using the shared account to reply. It also gives you the option to manually send from the shared account.

Edited to add that I only now see the specific description of the problem; it does look like this adds a copy to the sent folder on the send-as account.
posted by sagc at 7:47 PM on September 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

Create a filter (gear icon --> settings --> filters and blocked addresses --> create a new filter) in the shared gmail account that applies to all emails from "me" (or from the name of the shared account). Choose to have all new mail matching that criteria forwarded to your two individual accounts. Done!
posted by nobody at 7:50 PM on September 26, 2018

(It looks like you've already set up exactly that for all incoming mail. This filter will catch all outgoing mail as well.)
posted by nobody at 7:52 PM on September 26, 2018

Response by poster: If you set your default reply action to "reply all," it should include the sender email address as well.

Nope. The email appears in my personal account as

From: [e-mail]
To: [e-mail]

and reply-all creates a draft that is

From: [e-mail]
To: [e-mail]

Create a filter (gear icon --> settings --> filters and blocked addresses --> create a new filter) in the shared gmail account that applies to all emails from "me" (or from the name of the shared account). Choose to have all new mail matching that criteria forwarded to your two individual accounts. Done!

As far as we can tell, email sent from our personal accounts "as" the shared account never touches the shared account. So filters in the shared account don't work.

However! I added the shared account as a forwarding address in my personal account, and then made a filter in my personal account which forwards mail from the shared account to the shared account. And that works!

Sort of a sad situation, because it requires setup on each of our personal accounts instead of one setup in the shared account, but I'll take it. Thanks, all!
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 9:04 PM on September 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

I think the issue is in the way you set up the 'send as'. I am not an expert, just a long time user 2005 of GMail and had either this or a very similar problem in the past which I overcame.

Are your personal email accounts also GMail? If so, when you go to setting on the shared account to set up the 'send mail as' feature, delete the one you have already set up. Then add another email address. When you get the pop up asking you to enter the information DO NOT check the "treat as an alias" box. (I would actually read the "Learn more" next to it first.) It says you can uncheck it on an existing account, but I would start clean.

I have five of these setups for emails, but all 5 are either GMail or GSuite where Google administers the account. I do not fully understand it, but when I unchecked that box, it all seemed to work. I now will see the emails in the original account under sent mail. I also checked the reply from the same address the message was sent to.

I think if you set it up that way, you will see all the inbound and outbound emails in the other account.

If the other account is not a gmail or gsuite account, I do not know if this will work. I now recall that the issue came up for me because I was using Outlook and/or Exchange for one address and that was always appearing as "On behalf of". I wanted it to be clean so that no one knew anything but the one account.
posted by AugustWest at 9:35 PM on September 26, 2018

If you used Thunderbird you could add an automatic cc: to every email. It might involve an unacceptable change in habits, but you can use Thunderbird with Gmail via IMAP.
posted by rhizome at 11:29 PM on September 26, 2018

If you used Thunderbird, or in fact any dedicated mail client rather than webmail, you could just set these things up as multiple accounts in the clients instead of having them forward stuff to each other, and really reply from the shared account instead of just pretending to.
posted by flabdablet at 3:10 AM on September 27, 2018 [8 favorites]

drive by snippet: it sounds like a google group might solve this problem -- i've set up google groups for my households before for this exact purpose. you get a shared email address with the ability to send mail from your account on behalf of the group. added bonus for email indexing and the like. unfortunately i don't know how to jam an existing gmail into a new group.
posted by =d.b= at 10:36 AM on September 27, 2018

It might be a bit "round-about" but what about creating another gmail address...which you then set to forward to the [e-mail] address and cc it on all emails... hypothetically they will all come back...
posted by AnneShirley at 11:05 PM on September 29, 2018