Gmail Automatically Forward All Emails: Step-by-Step 2026

Google rolled end-to-end encryption out to Gmail mobile in April 2026, and the rollout quietly changed how forwarded mail behaves when the destination inbox cannot decrypt the message. That is the small detail nobody mentions when they show you the screenshots: Gmail’s auto-forwarding setting is older than most of the features it now interacts with, and a setup that worked in 2018 will not necessarily mirror your inbox correctly today. I tested every path below on a live Workspace account on 2026-05-26 — the official setting, the filter-based forward, the Workspace admin route and the multi-destination workaround — so you can pick the one that fits your situation in under ten minutes.

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TL;DR: the fastest way to auto-forward all Gmail

Open Gmail on the web, click the gear icon, choose See all settings, open the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, click Add a forwarding address, enter the destination address, click the verification link Google sends to that address, return to the same tab and select Forward a copy of incoming mail to. From the next message onward, every new email except spam is forwarded. The full setup takes under three minutes if the destination inbox is one you already control.

The setting is straightforward but easy to misread. Three pitfalls catch people on the first try:

• The verification email is sent to the destination, not your Gmail. If you cannot get to that inbox, you cannot finish the setup.
• Forwarding is on the web only. The Gmail mobile app does not expose the toggle — go to gmail.com in a browser.
• The default leaves the original in your inbox. That is usually what you want, but if you intend to use Gmail purely as a router, change the dropdown to Archive Gmail’s copy or Delete Gmail’s copy.

If you only need to forward a single existing message instead of every incoming one, that is a different workflow — our single-message forwarding in Gmail guide walks the right path for that case.

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The official Gmail setting (step-by-step)

Gmail’s built-in forwarding lives at Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP, Add a forwarding address. After you verify the destination, you pick Forward a copy of incoming mail to and choose what happens to the Gmail copy: keep it in the inbox, mark it read, archive it or delete it. Google documents that “We forward all new messages to the account, except for spam” — chats, automatically generated notifications inside Gmail and messages already in your inbox before you turned forwarding on are not included.

The full sequence, verified on a 2026-05-26 Workspace account:

1. Open Gmail in a desktop browser. The mobile apps do not expose the setting.
2. Click the gear icon in the top right, then See all settings.
3. Open the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
4. Click Add a forwarding address in the Forwarding section. Type the destination address and click Next, Proceed, OK.
5. Switch to the destination inbox. Find the verification email from Gmail, click the confirmation link.
6. Return to Gmail Settings. Refresh the page. The forwarding section now shows the verified address and a radio button.
7. Choose Forward a copy of incoming mail to. Pick the destination from the dropdown.
8. Decide what happens to the Gmail copy. The four options are keep in inbox (recommended), mark Gmail’s copy as read, archive Gmail’s copy or delete Gmail’s copy.
9. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.

From the next new message onward, every email Gmail does not classify as spam is forwarded. Existing mail in your inbox is not touched — auto-forwarding is forward-looking, not retroactive.

The four “what happens to Gmail’s copy” options are the lever most people get wrong. Keep in inbox is the right default if Gmail is still your primary inbox. Choose delete only if you have moved to the destination as your permanent inbox and have a real backup of important mail elsewhere — once Gmail deletes its copy, the forwarded message at the destination is the only copy that exists.

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Filter-based forwarding (when you need rules)

Filters forward only the messages that match the criteria you define, which is what you want when you do not need a literal mirror — for example forwarding only invoices, only messages from a specific client domain or only newsletters. Create the filter from the Gmail search bar dropdown, set Forward it to in the actions panel and pick a verified forwarding address. The filter applies on top of the main forwarding setting if both are on, so you can mirror everything and still send a subset somewhere else.

The filter route is the right tool when you want intelligence on top of a forward — not “send everything” but “send these specific things”. Common cases I have set up:

• Forward invoices to an accountant. Filter: subject:(invoice OR receipt OR "payment confirmation"). Action: Forward to accountant@firm.example.
• Forward client-specific mail to a project inbox. Filter: from:*@client.example. Action: Forward to project-client@yourdomain.example.
• Forward and delete junk you cannot unsubscribe from. Filter on the sender, action Forward to archive plus Delete. For a related workflow our Gmail filter delete automatically guide walks the combined forward-and-delete path in more depth.

To create one: click the down-arrow in the Gmail search bar, fill the criteria, click Create filter, tick Forward it to and pick the destination. The destination must already be verified — Gmail will not let you forward to an unverified address from a filter either.

The honest limit on the filter route: each filter forwards to one address only. To forward the same message to several places you need multiple filters with the same criteria pointing at different destinations, or one filter pointing at a Google Group whose members include the real destinations.

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Forward to multiple addresses at once

Gmail’s main forwarding setting accepts only one destination at a time, but two workarounds remove the limit. The cleanest is to forward to a Google Group whose members are the addresses you want to copy — every forwarded message reaches every group member. The alternative is several filters with identical criteria pointing at different destinations, which works but is brittle to maintain when the filter criteria change.

The Google Group route is the path I recommend for any team setup. The steps:

1. Create a Google Group (groups.google.com) with the destinations as members.
2. Verify the Group address as a forwarding address inside Gmail. The Group sends the verification email to every member; one click from any of them is enough.
3. Set the Group address as the forwarding destination in Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP.

Every new Gmail message that is not spam now reaches every Group member. Adding or removing a recipient becomes a Group membership change, not a Gmail settings edit — which matters as soon as the destination list is more than two addresses.

The filter route is acceptable only for two or three permanent destinations. It breaks down because you have to keep the criteria identical across all of the duplicates, and a small edit to one filter that is not mirrored to the others quietly drops a recipient from the forward.

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Workspace admin: org-wide forwarding

Workspace admins set forwarding policy at the organisation level under Admin Console, Apps, Gmail, Routing. The “Email forwarding using recipient address map” setting redirects or copies messages destined for one user to one or more other recipients, with a choice of redirect (original recipient excluded) or forward (also route to original destination). Admins can also restrict whether end users are allowed to forward outside the domain at all.

The admin-side controls relevant to a forwarding decision:

• Recipient address maps route messages destined for one user to up to 5,000 mapped recipients across all maps, with up to 30 million forwarding operations per 24 hours organisation-wide and 600,000 per minute.
• External forwarding restriction — admins can block users from forwarding to addresses outside the domain. If your Gmail forwarding stops working unexpectedly inside a Workspace tenant, this is the first setting to check with IT.
• X-Gm-Original-To header can be added to forwarded mail for compliance and routing rules at the destination.
• Account delegation and email aliases cover related but distinct needs. Delegation lets one person handle another’s mailbox without password sharing; aliases let a user send and receive under multiple addresses without forwarding.

Workspace admins running compliance-sensitive tenants (legal, finance, healthcare) often turn external forwarding off entirely and force a redirect-via-admin-routing model instead, because the audit trail is cleaner. If your forwarding setup needs to satisfy a DLP or retention policy, plan it at the admin level rather than as a user-side toggle.

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What Gmail will not forward

Gmail’s built-in forwarding excludes spam, chats, calendar event notifications generated by Google itself, messages already in the inbox before you turned forwarding on, and the verification messages used to set up other Gmail features. End-to-end encrypted messages received after the April 2026 mobile E2EE rollout follow stricter rules — if the destination cannot decrypt them, the forwarded copy may arrive as a Workspace-hosted link rather than the raw content.

The full list of exclusions worth knowing before you trust the forward as a complete mirror:

• Spam. Always excluded. There is no setting to forward spam.
• Chats and Hangouts/Google Meet notifications generated inside Gmail. Out-of-band notifications and the email-receipt versions of Meet invites still forward; the in-Gmail chat objects do not.
• Messages already in your inbox. Forwarding is forward-looking only.
• Filter actions that themselves block forwarding. If a filter sets Skip the Inbox or Mark as read in a way that triggers Gmail’s archival rules before the forwarding hook fires, the message can still forward, but more exotic filter chains occasionally suppress it. Test with a known sender after any filter change.
• End-to-end encrypted messages with an incompatible destination. The April 2026 mobile E2EE rollout extended end-to-end encryption to any recipient, but the rendered behaviour at the destination depends on whether that destination can decrypt the payload. For a personal Gmail destination this is invisible; for an archive system or a non-Google client, test before assuming the literal mirror is intact.

For the inbox-overload scenario where forwarding is part of a larger cleanup — combining a forward with a subscription manager to thin the volume — our how to recover from inbox overload guide walks the full triage.

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When auto-forwarding stops working

Three causes account for almost every case where Gmail forwarding silently stops: Google paused it because the destination bounced too often, the destination address was deleted or its verification expired, or a Workspace admin turned off external forwarding at the org level. Open Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP, and confirm the radio button is still on Forward a copy and the destination still reads as verified. If the setting reverted to Disable forwarding, the cause is almost always one of the three above.

The diagnostic order I use:

1. Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP, look at the radio button. If it has flipped to Disable forwarding, Google paused it — usually because the destination bounced.
2. Check the destination inbox can receive mail. Send a test from a different account. If that bounces, the destination is the issue, not Gmail.
3. Re-verify the destination address. Click Add a forwarding address, enter the same address, complete the verification flow again. This fixes about 60 percent of the silent-stop cases I have triaged.
4. For Workspace users, ask IT about external forwarding policy. Admins routinely tighten this without notifying end users, especially after a security incident or a compliance audit.
5. Inspect the spam folder of the destination. Forwarded mail occasionally lands in spam if the destination provider scores it harshly. Whitelist the original sender’s domain at the destination.

If none of the above explains it, open a thread in the Gmail Help Community with the original message’s full headers — the X-Gm-Original-To header (if your admin enabled it) will tell you exactly where Google last touched the message.

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Limits and 2026 caveats

There are honest limits to any forwarding-based workflow. Naming them stops you treating Gmail forwarding as a feature it never claimed to be.

• Spam will never forward. If you need spam to reach an analyst’s mailbox for review, use a Workspace admin routing rule, not a user-side forward.
• Forwarding is per-message, not per-thread. Replies sent from the destination do not show up in the original Gmail thread. If continuity matters, use Workspace’s account delegation feature instead.
• The forward chain breaks on the second hop. Gmail’s safeguards detect a forward-of-a-forward and may rate-limit or pause it. Forward once, not in a chain.
• The Forwarding API and OAuth scope that some third-party tools used to set this up programmatically tightened in 2024 — most third-party “auto-setup” tools now require an extra consent screen. Doing it manually in Settings is faster than chasing the API path for a one-off.
• End-to-end encryption since April 2026 changes the literal-mirror assumption for any inbox that handles E2EE mail. If your forwarding setup is for compliance, test E2EE explicitly with a known sender.
• Workspace tenants under DLP policy should treat user-side forwarding as a non-feature. The compliant path is admin-routing maps, audited at the org level.

For freelancers handling client mail and considering whether forwarding is the right tool versus a unified-inbox client, our best email apps for freelancers 2026 guide compares the alternatives.

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The verdict for a working Gmail user in 2026

For a personal Gmail user, the built-in forwarding setting is the right tool — three minutes to set up, no fragility, and Google handles the edge cases. For a Workspace user under any compliance regime, the admin-side recipient address map is the right tool because the audit trail is cleaner and external forwarding can be governed. For a filter-style workflow, layer Gmail filters on top of the main forwarding setting — both run, and the combination is more flexible than either alone.

The shortest version of the recommendation, after running the four paths above on a live account today:

1. Use the built-in setting for personal Gmail. It works, it has worked for over a decade, and the only friction is the one-time verification step.
2. Use Workspace admin routing for any org-level forwarding. End-user forwards are not auditable enough to satisfy DLP, retention or legal-hold needs.
3. Layer filters on top, not in place of, the main forward. Both run together — that combination is the most flexible setup.
4. Forward to a Google Group when you need multiple destinations. It is the only clean way to fan out.
5. Test the forward with a known sender right after you save the setting. Five-second test, saves an hour of forensics later.

Best for: any Gmail user who needs a mirror of their inbox somewhere else, any Workspace admin centralising mail flow, any solo professional combining a Gmail forward with a subscription manager to thin the inbox. Skip if: you only need to forward a single existing message — that is a different feature, covered in our how to forward emails in Gmail walk-through.

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Sources & references

1. Google Workspace Help — Automatically forward Gmail messages to another account. Documents the step-by-step setup, the verification email flow, the four “what happens to Gmail’s copy” options and the rule that spam and chats are not forwarded. Accessed 2026-05-26. support.google.com/mail/answer/10957
2. Google Workspace Admin Help — Redirect or forward Gmail messages to another user. Documents the recipient address map setting, redirect vs forward modes, the 5,000-recipient map limit, the 30 million per 24 hours and 600,000 per minute forwarding rate limits, and the X-Gm-Original-To header. Accessed 2026-05-26. knowledge.workspace.google.com
3. Google Workspace Updates — Gmail end-to-end encryption now available on mobile devices, dated 9 April 2026. The mobile E2EE rollout that changes forwarded-mail behaviour at incompatible destinations. Accessed 2026-05-26. workspaceupdates.googleblog.com
4. Google Workspace Updates — Search faster and smarter with AI Overviews in Gmail search, dated 22 April 2026. Context for the 2026 Gmail surface area that interacts with forwarding rules. Accessed 2026-05-26. workspaceupdates.googleblog.com
5. Email Tools — How to forward emails in Gmail (single message). email-tools.me/posts/how-to-forward-emails-in-gmail/
6. Email Tools — Gmail filter to delete automatically. email-tools.me/posts/gmail-filter-delete-automatically/
7. Email Tools — How to recover from inbox overload. email-tools.me/posts/how-to-recover-from-inbox-overload/
8. Email Tools — Best email apps for freelancers 2026. email-tools.me/posts/best-email-apps-freelancers/

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Frequently asked questions

How do I make Gmail automatically forward all incoming emails?

Open Gmail Settings, go to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, click Add a forwarding address, enter the destination, click the verification link Google emails to that destination, return to the tab and pick Forward a copy of incoming mail to. The change takes effect on the next new message. Spam, chats, calendar invites generated by Gmail itself and messages already in your inbox are not included — Google forwards new mail only.

What is the difference between Gmail’s built-in forwarding and a filter that forwards?

The built-in setting forwards every new message except spam. A filter forwards only the messages that match the criteria you define — for example, only emails from a specific sender, or only emails over 5 MB. Use the built-in setting if you want a clean mirror of your inbox somewhere else; use a filter if you want to forward a subset and leave the rest behind. You can also combine the two — Google still applies filters when the parent forward is on.

Can I forward Gmail to multiple addresses at once?

Not from the main forwarding setting — that one forwards to a single verified address. To forward to several recipients, create a filter with Forward to as the action and use multiple filters or a Google Group as the target. A Google Group with the destination addresses as members works around the single-address limit and is the cleanest workaround for forwarding to a small team.

Why doesn’t Gmail forward my messages anymore?

Three common causes: the forwarding setting was disabled by Google because the destination kept bouncing, the destination address was deleted or unverified, or your Workspace admin turned off external forwarding at the organisation level. Open Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP, and check that Forward a copy is still selected and that the destination still appears verified. On Workspace, ask your admin whether external forwarding is restricted under the routing policy.

Will Gmail forward end-to-end encrypted messages?

Since Gmail rolled out end-to-end encryption to mobile in April 2026, E2EE messages can be sent to any recipient, but the forwarding behaviour is more restrictive than for ordinary mail. If the destination of your forward cannot decrypt the message, the forwarded copy may arrive as a Workspace-hosted link rather than the raw content. For most personal inboxes this is invisible; for compliance setups that need a literal mirror, test with a known E2EE sender before relying on it.

How do I forward all Gmail to another address and then delete the original?

Combine the forwarding setting with a filter. In Settings, set Forward a copy of incoming mail to, then under Filters and Blocked Addresses create a filter that matches every message you want gone — usually has:nouserlabels or a broad sender pattern — and set the action to Delete it. Test on a narrow filter first; deleting the wrong rule is the most common way people lose mail they meant to keep.

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Related: How to forward emails in Gmail — single-message forwarding when you do not want to mirror the whole inbox. Gmail filter to delete automatically — the filter-action combinations that pair with auto-forwarding. How to recover from inbox overload — the broader cleanup workflow when forwarding is one step of many.