How to use gmail correctly with multiple accounts?

October 10, 2019 2:30 AM

I've been using Gmail with multiple accounts and aliases successfully for ages, but yesterday discovered that a number of my colleagues' emails were going direct to spam. So I whitelisted our organisation's email domain, and now every time I send an email as one of my aliases I get a copy of that email in my gmail inbox. How do I stop it?

I have a gmail account: [lollusc]@gmail.com
I also have the work address [lollusc]@[my.organisation].au
I have sent up forwarding of all email from my work mail to my gmail, and added [lollusc]@[my.organisation].au as an alias, so I can reply from that address too. I have it set to automatically reply from whichever email the mail was sent to.
(I am allowed to do this, by the way, so please don't derail about that).

Up until recently this functioned great.

Now that I have set up the whitelisting filter for "@[my.organisation].au" to "never send to spam", I get a copy of all emails I send from [lollusc]@[my.organisation].au in my inbox, which I don't want. And setting an extra filter to filter emails from [lollusc]@[my.organisation].au to skip the inbox doesn't have any effect at all.

Googling suggests this is expected behaviour with extra email addresses if you tick the box marked "treat as alias" in the settings. All I can think of for why it didn't happen before yesterday is that previously an email to my inbox from my alias was still being generated, but this was being spam filtered, which was kind of nice.

I can untick the "treat as alias" box, but then every time I do "reply all" which is most emails I send, it also adds my own email in the CC field, and I end up getting extra copies of emails to my inbox that way.

How do I stop the madness?

posted by lollusc to Technology (2 answers total)

You mentioned that your filter to "skip the inbox" for mail from [e-mail] wasn't working. You may want to change the order of the filters - when you edit a filter, it changes the order (so you can make a fake edit and then put it back to what it was before). Might not help, but worth a try!
posted by beyond_pink at 6:36 AM on October 10, 2019

Response by poster: Changing the order didn't help, but digging around in the filters did help me realise what was going on. My account [lollusc]@[myorganisation].au actually has an alias too - it is also [string of numbers]@[myorganisation].au. Seeing filters I've created in the past reminded me that previously I have had to use the [string of numbers] address on filters to get it to work, even though the email appears to come to the [lollusc] address. So I switched it to that, and it's working now.
posted by lollusc at 3:58 AM on October 11, 2019