Gmail – Unspammed GMail messages not being forwarded

email-forwardinggmailspam-prevention

I have a GMail account that forwards email to several accounts.

A few important messages were incorrectly marked as spam. When I marked these mails as "Not Spam", they were not forwarded to the forwarding addresses.

Is there any way to make sure unspammed messages are automatically forwarded?
Or do I have to do this painful labour manually whenever GMail makes a spam classification mistake?

Best Answer

Filters are not processed when you mark a message as not spam. They are only processed when the message first arrives in your mailbox.

You have two choices:

  1. Manually forward them when this happens.
  2. Use a second account which reads the mail from this account via POP3 and has all of the forwarding rules you defined before.

The first option is self explanatory. It's important to note that these kind of forwards are not the same as a forward invoked by a filter. The two main differences are that you will see quoted text with the former, and the 'to' address will be different as well.

The second option involves setting up another email address and exporting (and deleting) all of your filters from your old account and importing them into that new account. Then set up a filter on the top of the new account which will never send messages to spam. Next, set up the new account to read the mail from the old account using POP3. Since the email will be read via POP3, it will read mail that was previously marked as spam but was then moved to the Inbox. The only disadvantage with this method is that it won't be instantaneous. You could try to increase the frequency the POP3 is read, but that's about it.