Daniel's Blog

Adding a second email to a google email account

For our company, we send lots of emails. Not tens of thousands. If that were the case we'd use Amazon Simple Email Service. We will probably move to that in the future just to support bounce and rejection detection during customer signup as it would be great to just reject customers that send a bad email before they even come into the system.

In the meantime we use a google account specified specifically for emailing customer notifications: Mailer and it has an email: mailer-email.

So we decided to create a support email. This will work with our support software to send/receive support message from our clients: support-email.

The email addresses are not necessary for this article, and I'd like to keep them from being scraped.

The difference between these alias' is that the mailer one simply sends email, but the support one will need to send and receive email.

So how to set this up:

Setup the email address for the mailer account

To do this I did the following:

  1. Went to the admin console. I am a google administrator for my organization.
  2. Go to Directory->Users and select the Mailer user.
  3. Add alternate email for the support account (support-email) email address.
  4. Launch a private window or incognito window browser, login to GMail using the Mailer account settings.
  5. Use another email address to send an email to the new Support email and it was received by the mailer account. Great.

Setup the email filter

I don't want the emails for the Support email address to go to the inbox. Why? Because the Mailer emails go there. It shouldn't receive emails, but the reality is that there is some significant spam, advertisements, and signup bounces that end up in that email inbox. I don't want those to all become support tickets for the support team so I need to create a filter for the support emails.

  1. Go to the mail settings for the Mailer account.
  2. It opens quick settings, so choose all settings
  3. Go to filters and blocked addresses
  4. Add a filter that will label all emails to support-email with the label "support" and skip the inbox.
  5. Apply the filter to the existing messages and the test message will be filtered out appropriately.

Setup the email alias

I want the emails sent to use the support email, not the mailer email, so I added an email alias

  1. Go to the mail settings for the Mailer account.
  2. It opens quick settings, so choose all settings
  3. Go to Accounts
  4. Add an email alias for the support email.
  5. Test responding to the original email by sending a reply. While composing the reply, select the "to" dropdown to expose the from setting and change it to the support email address.

Setup the sending settings for the support software

Opening up the support software it needs the following parameters to connect to the mailer account to send email responses from tickets:

Method: SMTP Server: smtp.gmail.com Port: 587 Username: mailer-email Password: -_- Encryption: TLS

I had to save the settings before testing the email, but that's fine. It's a small gotcha and is documented.

Setup the receiving settings for the support software

Receiving the email is a little more involved.

Protocol: IMAP Server: imap.gmail.com Port: 993 Username: mailer-email Password: -_- Encryption: SSL IMAP Folders: (the label created above)

I had to save the settings before selecting the Imap folders. But everything worked out.