As you’ll see when you visit the forwarding options you can also use filters to forward mail.  Based on my needs I went that route and had things setup to forward to me and my wife, and THOUGHT we were receiving all of the messages properly.  But later after chatting with other moms in the class realized the filter wasn’t picking up on messages from one of our teachers because they were putting us as BCC (blind carbon copy) recipients.  Our other teacher (I have twins, so both started kindergarten at the same time) however was sending messages to everybody simply in the To field, which we were receiving without any problems.  After some research I learned that Gmail doesn’t make it very obvious how to filter on a message when you’re only a BCC recipient.  So after some research and trial and error I figured it out and here’s how you can do it.

Step 1 – Open up your settings in Gmail in the account you want to forward mail from.  From there, choose the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.  Under forwarding, you will see a box to Add a forwarding address.

Step 2 – Enter in the address you want to forward mail to and click next.  Gmail will send a verification code to that email address to ensure that you are an owner of that account. Once you receive the email containing the code, enter it into the confirmation code box and click Verify.

Step 3 – Once you have verified the destination address, click on the Filters tab and click Create a new filter.  We are now going to enter the specific details to ensure all mail, including messages you are BCC recipients on get sent to the address we just added.  When the Create a Filter wizard comes up we want to enter deliveredto:youraddress@gmail.com in the textbox labeled Has the words.  This is the important part, and something I didn’t realize when I first setup a filter with only my account in the To field.  That won’t get BCC messages.  Again, you are putting the address of the account you want to forward from (i.e. familyaccount@gmail.com).

Step 4 – Select the Mark as read checkbox and the Forward it to checkbox.  To the right of the Forward it to checkbox you will see the email account you verified in Step 2 as an option.  Make sure it’s selected and click Create Filter.

Step 5 – Now you’re done.  You can repeat this for any additional addresses you want to forward mail to.  I do believe I read somewhere that Gmail has a limit of like 10 or 20 addresses that you can forward to, so keep that in mind if you are trying to do more than just a few.

Now you have a stand along family or shared email account that forwards ALL messages to one or more recipients.  The nice thing about this is that Gmail offers you so much storage that you also have an archive of all these messages that you can go back and search on over time.  Heck, maybe someday it will be fun for us to look back at the first emails we were getting when our kids started kindergarten.

Hope this helps!  Contact me if you have any problems and I’ll try to help you out.

I hate to admit it but I have been going without disability insurance for some time now (well, actually I’ve never had it).  Seeing as how I’m the only one working and with benefits for my family I finally got off my lazy ass and put the wheels in motion to get some disability insurance.  Actually, to be honest, I actually inquired and started to put the wheels in motion back in February 2008, they just didn’t roll very far.  So finally in October I contacted the same disability company again and asked for them to renew my quote and adjust a few things.

I took about a month and a half to two months from start to finish from the paperwork phase to the approval phase.  Last week (a few days before my birthday) I got some paperwork from the insurance company.  I assumed it was the final paperwork that I needed to review, sign and send back.  What it turned out being were the test results for my blood work, which they send out as a formality and “for my records.”  The strange thing was how many things fell into the abnormal or high column (I forget the exact working at the moment).  Aparantly my cholesterol is pretty high (total was like 250 or 254).  I guess from what I’ve seen from my research that over 200 total is in the “high” category.

I’ve never really had any problems with cholesterol, high blood pressure, etc.  I guess the past few months of not going to the gym and eating like total crap have really caught up with me.  I haven’t yet gotten the final paperwork from the insurance company based on these results, but I’m assuming that these “risk factors” will probably make the rate they quoted me slightly higher.  I guess I’ll now need to decide if I go and get re-tested in a few weeks or just pay the higher rate, hoping that I can get re-assed and lowered later when I’m in better health.

My previous excuse for the exercising at least has been that I’ve been working a ton of hours lately (~65).  I used to go during lunch on work days which was a nice break in the day.  Now I’ve been working through lunch and not leaving myself any time to exercise.  Starting this week I’ve decided that I need to stop making excuses and to get my ass up an hour earlier during the week to get to the gym.

As stated at the start of the post, my weight at the start of this week was 190 lbs.  My ultimate goal would be to get down to 170, but I don’t think that’s realistic.  I’d be happy with 175.  We’ll see how it goes.  Not only am I going to get back into the gym habit but I’m going to cut out fried food and really watch what I eat.  The biggest problem for me will be trying to cut out beer.  I may just have to work out a little more/harder to make up for that vice.  I guess we’ll see how things go!