Configuring a Custom Email Address Forward with Gmail

Postmark gives you a unique email address to send your emails to, but it’s not easy to remember and it’s on our domain. You will probably want an easier to remember address on your own domain, like reply@yourdomain.com. Postmark also has MX Record support if you have access to update DNS records, but in the mean time (or if you don’t have control of the DNS records) we recommend using Gmail/Google Apps as a simple forwarding service to provide your users with an email address at your domain.

One of the main reasons to use Google’s mail forwarding is that Gmail will handle a fair amount of any inbound spam that your inbox might start to catch before it even gets to Postmark, potentially saving you parse credits. We’ve also tested with Gmail and know that the + sign filter works with Postmark’s “MailboxHash” parsing.

Configuring a Gmail Forwarding Address with Postmark

1. Create an email address on your Google Apps account that you want your customers to send mail to. It’s common to have the username be the action that the customer wants, like reply@yourdomain.com to reply to comments or upload@yourdomain.com to upload image attachments. Once you’ve created this address and verified that it can receive email, you can configure forwarding.
2. Log into your new email account, and then click the gear icon at the top right of any Gmail page, then click Settings.
3. Click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
4. Click the first drop-down menu in the “Forwarding” section, and click “Add new email address”.
5. Enter your custom Postmark email, it should look like yourhash@inbound.postmarkapp.com For security, Gmail will send a verification to that email address.
6. Log into Postmark, browse to the Stream connected to the inbound email address you just forwarded to.
7. Click the Activity page for that Stream.
8. Click the Inbound activity feed.
9. Find the confirmation message from the Gmail team in your inbound activity feed and click on it.
10. Click the verification link in that email.
11. Back in your Gmail account, select the “Forward a copy of incoming mail to…” option and select your forwarding address from the drop-down menu.
12. Select the action you’d like your messages to take from the drop-down menu. You can choose to keep Gmail’s copy of the message in your inbox, or you can send it automatically to All Mail or Trash. You might want to keep a copy of inbound email in Gmail, as Postmark only stores messages for 45 days.
13. Click Save Changes.

You also can set up filters to forward messages that meet specific criteria, if you want to be more specific about which emails get forwarded along to Postmark for parsing.