This article is for Google Workspace administrators and people who use Gmail for work or school. To learn how to forward messages as an individual Gmail user, go to Automatically forward Gmail messages to another account.
Google Workspace offers several ways for people in your organization to forward or redirect email to other accounts. As an administrator, you can let all users in your organization forward email, or only users in certain groups or departments. You can also let people in your organization set up forwarding for their own account.
Compare email forwarding and email redirecting
Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, email forwarding and email redirecting are different.
Forwarding changes the content of the original message, and forwarded messages include the message history. Redirecting doesn't change the content of the original message, and redirected messages appear to come directly from the original sender.
Change message recipients with address maps
As an admin, you can redirect incoming messages to one or more new recipients. You can optionally also deliver redirected message to the original recipient. For example, when someone leaves your organization, redirect their messages to another person's account, or to an account you create for this purpose.
Some benefits of redirecting messages are:
- You have control and visibility over where user mail is redirected.
- You can map a single email address to up to 12 other addresses.
- You can choose to have redirected messages sent only to the new addresses. Or, messages can be sent to the new addresses and to the original recipient.
- Depending on your email sending practices, we may reduce the recipient address limit for your domain. This can affect recipient limits for your address maps. We recommend you follow our best practices for sending mail to Gmail users.
Learn how to redirect messages with address maps.
Send to more recipients with user-level routing
You can set up certain accounts so messages for those accounts are sent to additional addresses.
For example, messages for specific user can be automatically sent to another user. Optionally, you can remove any attachments sent by untrusted senders before messages are delivered to people in your organization.
- You have control and visibility over where user mail is forwarded.
- You can choose to have redirected messages sent only to the new addresses. Or, messages can be sent to the new addresses and to the original recipient.
Learn how to Set up routing for your domain or organization.
Let users forward messages with automatic forwarding
You can let your people in your organization automatically forward incoming mail to another email address. For example, someone going on vacation can automatically forward all their messages to a colleague who's covering for them.
- As an admin, you control this feature in your Google Admin console. For details, go to Disable automatic forwarding.
- Automatic forwarding lets users control and change where their messages are forwarded.
- Users can set up only one forwarding address.
- To check messages forwarded by people in your organization, use Email Log Search.
Learn how to let your users automatically forward Gmail messages to another account.
Let users forward messages with Gmail filters
People in your organization can manage their incoming messages with filters. Filters can automatically forward messages (or take other actions) based on rules set up by the account owner. For example, you can create a filter to automatically forward messages from an important customer to your manager.
- As an admin, you control this feature in your Google Admin console. For details, go to Disable automatic forwarding.
- Users can create up to 20 filters that forward to other addresses.
- To check messages forwarded by people in your organization, use Email Log Search.
For details, direct your users to Create rules to filter your emails
