Gmailing Myself

Q: In Mail, I receive copies of not just every message I receive at Gmail, but also every message I send. This occurs in my Inbox on the home computer after a day spent using webmail. Weird.

A: If you have a Gmail account, you can set Mail up to check your Gmail along with other accounts. Google provides great instructions for this in a myriad of different mail readers if you’re interested in setting it up - but it does have some quirks.

One of the quirks is that every message you send from the Gmail web interface shows up in your Mail reader Inbox. How annoying! Don’t we get enough junk mail without having to read all of the emails we send twice?

After mucking around a bit, I found a simple solution to this. You can use the Mail “Rules” function to take care of this extra mail. As an extra bonus, this trick should work in any email clients that allow you to set up rules, so it’s not limited to Mail or even OS X!

• Go to Mail→Preferences, and click the “Rules” icon.
• Click “Add Rule.”
• Give the rule a description like “Gmailing Myself Crazy!”
• Set the following rule (using the + button to add a second part to the rule). The ALL selection means that both criteria must be met. The “From Contains <your gmail address>” section selects all emails sent FROM your gmail account. The “To Does Not Contain <your gmail address>” section ensures that if you do actually send an email to yourself, you will still receive it.

• There’s one last trick here. You need to tell this rule where to move the offending emails, by choosing to “Move Message to mailbox:” and selecting your Gmail SENT box. You’ll find it here (your menus won’t be blank because you won’t have blocked out the email information from blog voyeurs!):

Setting this rule will ensure that any emails you send in Gmail will be routed correctly to the Gmail Sent folder, and not show up in your inbox as if you’d been CC’ing yourself on every last email. There’s just one liability here: if you BCC yourself, the BCC’d message will also be placed in your Sent box because your email address won’t show up in the header information.