This is beyond MPU’s scope, but I imagine it might interest others here.
I have three main email accounts. They’re all Gmail (for now). I’m tempted to use email forwarding and aliases to consolidate them into one primary account. That way I can use Hey-ish server-side filtering rules while only keeping one set of contacts.
I did this once before, but found some of my contacts were getting confused because it looked like I was using different addresses. Knowing what I know now, I think I must have occassionally forgotten to switch the address I was sending from.
Beyond that, is there anything else I should consider in making this jump? Any gotchas or caveats I might not realize until a week in?
You might want to give some thought to how you use the accounts, just to be sure you want to receive them all at the same place (it sounds like you do).
I have two different work accounts (both GMail) and a few personal ones (also all GMail; not all of them get regular use).
I access the work accounts through Airmail, and the personal accounts through Spark. That provides a nice balance of consolidation and separation.
Airmail lives only on machines whose main use is during work hours. It does not live on my phone. That helps keep me from going down unnecessary rabbit holes during evenings and weekends.
I have a Google G-Suite account and set it for “catch all” emails.
Whenever I need an email address for a new account etc I use the name of that service@mybusinessaccount.com
This allows me to filter the emails coming from these accounts and also see to who else they leak that email address to
So far I have had zero issues with spam being send to random accounts.
If I need an account to send email from I use one of the 30 available slots to create an alias.
I did this for a while, and found it to be really great as long as I used the Gmail website, and their iOS app. I found the aliases didn’t work at all with any 3rd party clients. So that could be a negative if you want to use something other than Google’s apps.
Ultimately that didn’t bother me too much. The reason why I stopped was simply because I still just sometimes have ick-y feelings from running everything through Google. But then I tell myself it worked so why did I care?
Also it required me to sync and create contacts only through Gmail, since my other accounts didn’t sync contacts over.
I’ve been consolidating my Gmail accounts for a few years by forwarding two regular Gmail accounts into a Google Workspace (G Suite) account. I have a couple of rules that labels forwarded email to identify which account they came from, which helps to quickly identify the message.
And under Settings/Accounts I select:
When replying to a message: Reply from the same address the message was sent to
When you use webmail Google will use the proper return address, but you will need to select your desired return address from a pull down menu when using the IOS client.
