Today we realized something rather important – if you are forwarding messages between two Gmail accounts (in our case both really Google Apps accounts) then it’s quiet possible you are missing some email thanks to Google’s spam filtering. Let me explain.

When a Gmail account processes mail one of the first things it does it test it for spam (and other custom filters). When it finds spam it marks it as such and removes it from the inbox. The kicker is that all of this happens before the email is forwarded. Only when the email reaches the inbox does it get forwarded to our second account.

Fortunately there’s a rather easy way to fix this – by creating our own filter to make sure that messages marked as spam are moved into the inbox so they will be forwarded (effectively turning off the spam filter). To do this follow these steps:

• Start a search in Gmail for “in:spam”
• Click the drop down arrow to the right of the search field and choose “Create filter with this search”
• You’ll next get an error about using “in”, etc. labels in searches. Just click “OK”
• Now choose “Never send it to Spam” and click “Create Filter”
• Sit back and enjoy your spam being forwarded

Don’t worry, so long as the account your forwarding your messages to doesn’t have this filter created it’ll do the spam filtering for you keeping all your messages in one account. Sure wish this was the default behavior and that we’d found this out before we saw the 7400 spam messages.