Connect Gmail (and add a second inbox later)

Most receipts arrive by email now. If yours do, the cheapest minute you'll ever spend on receipt-keeping is the one where you connect your inbox so they sort themselves.

What "connecting Gmail" actually does

You create a Google app password — a separate 16-letter password just for The Paper Keep — and connect Gmail over IMAP with it. Your real Google password never leaves Google. The Paper Keep looks through the folders you choose for receipt-shaped emails — order confirmations, tax invoices, subscription receipts — and pulls them into your account. It only reads: it doesn't mark messages read, and never sends, moves or deletes mail.

Google only offers app passwords once 2-Step Verification is on. If that ever feels off, revoke the app password from your Google account at any time. The receipts already imported stay where they are; the connection just stops fetching new ones.

The first scan is the longest one

When you connect, you pick the import window — the last 30 days for the fastest start, 90 days (the default), a full 12 months of backfill, or a custom start date — and hit Start importing receipts.

The initial import runs at about 180 receipts an hour. After that, ongoing inbox scans look at new mail every few minutes — barely visible.

What to do when you have more than one inbox

Plenty of people end up with receipts split across two or three accounts: a personal Gmail, a work Gmail, an old Yahoo address that still gets old subscription receipts. You can connect each one as a separate inbox; receipts from all of them land in the same account, tagged so you can see which inbox each one came from.

One pattern that works well: connect personal and work to the same account if the work expenses are yours to claim (e.g. you're a contractor invoicing through a sole trader ABN). Keep them separate if work expenses go through your employer's system — you'll only confuse yourself trying to merge those.

Folder picking

Every connection — Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, Fastmail, custom servers — lets you tick exactly which folders to scan during setup. INBOX is the default. If your mail rules already sort receipts into a dedicated folder, point The Paper Keep at just that folder and it stays the cleanest feed you'll ever have.

You can change a connection's folders later from its Edit menu in Settings.

What if The Paper Keep misses one?

It happens. Some receipt formats (especially HTML-only marketing-heavy ones) don't get recognised on the first pass. The fix is simple: forward that single email to your personal forwarding address and it gets parsed the same way as everything else.

Disconnecting and reconnecting

Disconnect from Settings → Receipt sources (the ⋯ menu on the connection's row). The receipts that already came in stay; nothing is deleted. Reconnecting later starts a fresh scan, but the dedupe logic catches anything that was already imported, so you won't end up with two of everything.

This works even better inside The Paper Keep — start a 14-day free trial.