Gmail – How to bulk/mass forward emails in Gmail using contacts lists in a search/filter manner

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One of my Gmail accounts receives too much spam and I want to abandon it and use a new one. For this I want to specify that if any one from my contact lists sends an email to my current email account, which I am going to abandon, it gets forwarded to the new one automatically.

There are more than 160+ contacts, that will take a lot of time to set forwarding filters through settings. Is there a better way to include a contact list and apply the filter on that?

Best Answer

Unfortunately, Gmail doesn't allow setting up filters that key off of contact groups or even whether or not an email address is in your contacts. However, since you're not looking to make changes to your contacts once you've set up this filter, there is a way to make your filter contain your current list of contacts in a relatively simple way.

First, it's assumed that you've already set up the email address you're forwarding to and gone through the steps to authorize it.

This also won't work if you have too many contacts, since the filter can only hold so many.

  1. Create a special group that will contain all of your contacts. (e.g., autoforward-people-i-know)
  2. Add all the contacts you want to have messages forwarded (presumably "My Contacts") to this new group.
  3. Create a new filter. In the "From" field on the form, start typing the name of your newly created group. Once it appears in the list, click it. You will now see all of the email addresses in that group are now listed in the field.
  4. Continue the steps to finish your autoforward filter.

If you find you have too many contacts to fit in one filter using this method, you could always just do it multiple times with smaller groups (perhaps those you've already set up). Not as simple as doing it one time, but certainly simpler than doing it for every contact.

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