How To Forward Multiple E-mails at Once in Gmail

Although texting and social media sites have become ever-more popular as ways to communicate, when it comes to business and getting work done, email is still the king of the communications world. Knowing how to get the most out of your email can make your work life far more productive, increase your effectiveness, and put money in your pocket. For that reason, it’s essential to know how to use your email to its fullest capability. In this tutorial article, I will show you how to forward multiple emails at once using Gmail.

Anyone can have a Gmail account, and more than a billion people use a Gmail account every month. Gmail is free, powerful, easy to use, and comes with 15 GBs of free cloud storage, which is nothing to sneeze at. As one of the most feature-rich free email platforms, Gmail is steadily developed by Google and improvements are common and frequent. Despite all of the features Google has developed for Gmail, there is no bulk forwarding option in Gmail.

Forwarding future emails based on specific criteria is a straightforward process. All you have to do is set up a filter and instruct the filter to forward qualifying emails (based on specific criteria) to a different email address.

You can then apply this filter to existing emails. However, the functionality of this option is rather spotty. (This is a polite way of saying that it sometimes doesn’t work.) So while forwarding emails you’re going to get is quite simple, forwarding emails that you have already gotten may require some additional work. Note: As of 2019 the filter feature is much more reliable than it used to be with regard to finding current emails that fit the filter criteria.

This gives us three basic approaches to forwarding: set up a filter and hope it works on your existing emails, forward the emails yourself manually, or use a browser extension to do it for you. This how-to article will look at all three methods.

Use Filters to Forward Multiple emails in Gmail

Using filters isn’t ideal as it will forward future arrivals to your new address, and doesn’t reliable forward existing emails, it is worth a try as this is a simple approach that would cover existing and future email conversations.

Follow these instructions to set up email forwarding using Gmail Filters:

1. Log into your Gmail account
   
2. Click the gear icon in the upper right side of the Gmail interface which will reveal a pull-down menu.
   
3. Choose See all settings from the pull-down menu.
   
4. Click on the Filters and blocked addresses tab.
   
5. Click Create a new filter.
   
6. Type the From address of the email address you would like to forward in the From field other criteria, such as name, subject, content or that has an attachment. You can also filter by words the email does not contain which can be useful.
   
7. Click Create filter.
   
8. Look for the option you want, in this case, Forward it. Notice that the option is still disabled.
   
9. Click add forwarding address to add the address you want to forward the email to.
   
10. You will be re-directed to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Select Add a forwarding address.
    
11. Enter the email address, then hit Next.
    
12. A confirmation pop-up window will appear. To confirm, click on Proceed.
    
13. An email will be sent to the forwarding email address. Copy the confirmation code, enter it on the box provided, and hit Verify.
    
14. Don’t forget to choose Forward a copy of incoming mail to in the selection.
    
15. Click on Save Changes to have it take effect.
    
16. Repeat steps 2 to 7. Now, the forward option should be enabled. Click on the box before it.
    
17. Check the box next to Also apply filter to xx matching conversations.
    
18. Finally, click on Create filter.
    

Now, Gmail will forward emails that match your criteria, to the email address you’ve specified.

Note, as of this writing, this only works for forwarding new emails, old emails won’t be forwarded.

Manually Forward Multiple Emails in Gmail

If you have a group of emails that you want to forward, but that you won’t need to forward again (for example, if you are organizing your past archives of messages), you might want to manually forward your emails, especially if there are only a few of them.

It used to be possible to select multiple emails using the checkboxes next to the emails you want to forward, selecting forward and send all the emails at once, but that functionality has been removed. Unfortunately, you have to manually forward each email.

To manually forward emails, you must go into each email individually and select Forward from the little gray box at the bottom of the email window. Not recommended if you have more than a few messages to forward.

Use a Chrome Extension to Forward Multiple Emails in Gmail

If you don’t mind using extensions, there are a few out there that will bulk forward emails in Gmail. As Gmail and Chrome are within the same ecosystem, it is best to use Chrome when doing this rather than another browser. I tried a few extensions when putting this tutorial together and only found one that works properly. Of the five or so listed in the Chrome web store, only Multi Email Forward for Gmail worked.

Multi Email Forward for Gmail

Multi Email Forward for Gmail is a Chrome extension does exactly what it says it will do. It enables you to forward multiple emails from within Gmail.

It does require you to create an account with CloudHQ who make the extension and I have no idea why. However, once created, the extension works perfectly every time. If you use Gmail for business or a lot for personal use, this could be a very useful addition to your Gmail toolbox.

There’s also a daily limit for sending forwarded emails with a free account, as of this writing, the limit is 50 per day.

Block Emails From Spam Senders in Gmail

When you do get filter forwarding set up in your Gmail account, you might find that spam (usually filtered out by Google) is also forwarded too. I found that a good number of junk emails that Gmail would usually assign to Spam were being forwarded instead of dumped. That’s when I stumbled across this trick to block emails from spam senders in Gmail.

Follow the instructions above, adding the spammers’ email address in the  From address, setting the filter to delete emails from that sender.

As I said, only a few junk emails were caught up in the forwarding filter when I created it so I only had to add a few email addresses. This would be no good for the hundreds of spam emails we get each day but should tidy up the forwarding process a bit.

Those are the only ways I have found to forward multiple emails at once in Gmail. The filter method works well enough but is a bit hit and miss with emails already in your inbox. The Chrome extension is okay if you don’t mind using extensions and use Chrome. Perhaps just use Chrome for Gmail and use a different browser for other surfing to preserve a bit of privacy – it’s up to you.

Use Thunderbird to Forward Multiple Emails

As mentioned by Dan in the comments, you can easily use a third-party email app, such as Thunderbird, to forward multiple emails at once. This can be accomplished with a little reconfiguration of the settings or by installing an add-on, such as Mail Redirect. Available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, you can easily setup and configure email forwarding, encryption, and a plethora of other features with a few clicks in Thunderbird.

Do you know of any other effective ways to forward multiple emails at once in Gmail? Know of any other browser extensions that work? Tell us about them below in the comments!