I don't want to copies!

July 3, 2012 5:53 PM

Google Apps and Gmail Funniness. When I send from my gmail accout to my google apps account, I get a copy of the email in BOTH places. What is askew?

I have a gmail account, lets say its fuzzy@gmail and I run a Google Apps instance for my website, let call it paws.com, where I have an account (and associated email) of firstname@paws.

fuzzy@gmail is the recovery address for the GA instance of paws.com.

When I send an email from fuzzy@gmail to firstname@paws I recieve new mail in both boxes. Why and how do I stop it?

Fuzzy and first name are not connected in any way.

Thanks for your help.

posted by Fuzzy Dog to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Are you using a desktop software or a smartphone to send the email? If you are, there is probably a setting to always bcc yourself.
posted by vidur at 6:58 PM on July 3, 2012

Just a data point, I have this happen, too, and without any sort of BCC thing set up as vidur describes. But in my case, I thought it happened because I do have the two accounts associated with each other (on the Google Apps one, I can "send as" the Gmail one). So it's interesting to hear that you're having it happen even without having that in place. Maybe Google thinks/has figured out that you're likely the same person? They have algorithms that do that sort of thing, hence why on Android phones every so often notifications come up asking whether two contacts should be linked.
posted by limeonaire at 9:08 PM on July 3, 2012

Related?

I had a similar issue and I have having a hard time recalling what the explanation and fix was, but I addressed it within a Google setting after reading about it either on this site or Lifehacker. I am failing to find the place right now, but will keep looking.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:44 PM on July 3, 2012

Response by poster: Not through a phone, I'm using Chrome. The accounts are not linked. :-( @ JohnnyGunn, I hope you find the solution. Thanks for looking.
posted by Fuzzy Dog at 10:58 PM on July 3, 2012

Does the e-mail show up immediately? If not you probably have pop3 collection on.
posted by devnull at 12:05 AM on July 4, 2012

Response by poster: No POP3 and it is Immediate.
posted by Fuzzy Dog at 1:11 AM on July 4, 2012

Best answer: Here is what I found was causing this for me. It relates to treating an account as an alias. If you go into "Settings" on your gmail account and look in "accounts". find the account you can send mail as and uncheck the treat as an alias. It will stop. I think. Or it did for me. The link really walks you through this. Now sure if you have to do it in both the gmail account and the apps account.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 1:19 AM on July 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: @JohnnyGunn Thanks, that did it!

A warning to those who read this in the future, I never set this up, it happened automatically.
posted by Fuzzy Dog at 11:02 AM on July 4, 2012

You're right in that it does default to the "alias" setting that causes the copies. I am sure that there is some good reason for that default, but it eludes me at this time. I lived with this for months thinking there was some sort of crossed wires on the google servers. I wish I could properly credit whomever taught me to change this, but I never did remember. I had a vague recollection that it was in settings and spent time searching there again until I found it.

Glad the solution worked!
posted by JohnnyGunn at 11:32 AM on July 4, 2012

A warning to those who read this in the future, I never set this up, it happened automatically.

That's quite worrying. If you didn't setup your gmail account to "send mail as" another account, it would be a good idea to report this to Gmail and get some info on when and from which IP this was done to your account. I can't imagine any legit mechanism that would allow this to happen automatically.

I too have a primary gmail account that I have set up to send email as two other gmail accounts, and I also have a Google Apps mail account for my domain which has my primary gmail account as recovery address. Nothing of this sort has happened yet.
posted by vidur at 12:56 PM on July 4, 2012