Forwarding receipt emails the smart way

Forwarding receipts one at a time works. Forwarding them automatically, by rule, is what turns email receipts from a chore into background noise.

You get a personal forwarding address

Every account has a unique address shaped like [email protected]. It's yours, it doesn't expire, and anything you forward to it lands in your account. Treat it like a private API key — don't post it on the internet, don't share it casually, and rotate it from Settings if you suspect it's leaked.

Find yours under Settings → Receipt sources — the forwarding row has a one-click copy button, and its menu links to a setup guide with a downloadable Gmail filter, which we'll get to in a moment.

The simple manual version

For people who only see five or ten receipts a week, manual forwarding is fine. When a receipt lands, hit forward, paste the address, send. The email lands in The Paper Keep with the original attached, and you can throw the original away on the email side if you like.

One small gotcha: forward, don't reply. Replies usually mangle the original headers and HTML; forwards keep the message intact.

The filter rule version (recommended)

The cleaner pattern is a Gmail filter that watches for receipt-shaped mail and auto-forwards it. Most receipts share a handful of subject-line words — "receipt", "invoice", "order confirmation", "payment confirmation", "your order".

The pre-made Gmail filter file (downloadable from the forwarding setup guide in Settings) ships with these subject patterns already configured and your personal address filled in. You import it once, hit "Create filters", and Gmail does the work from then on.

What about Outlook, iCloud, Fastmail?

Same idea, slightly different UI. Outlook calls them "Rules" under Settings → Mail → Rules. iCloud Mail has rules in Mail.app. Fastmail has the most flexible rules system of all of them. The trigger conditions are the same: from-address patterns plus subject keywords. The action is the same: forward to your token address.

If your provider doesn't support auto-forward at all, the fallback is connecting the inbox directly via Gmail OAuth or IMAP. That's a different setup but lands the same outcome.

Watch for the over-forward

The classic mistake when setting up a new filter is making it too broad. A rule that forwards every email containing "invoice" will also catch invoice-shaped marketing, "free invoice template" newsletters, and that one friend who works in accounts. After turning a filter on, check the receipts list for a week — if non-receipts are sneaking in, narrow the rule.

What if you change email providers?

Your forwarding address is yours regardless of which mailbox sits behind it. If you switch from Gmail to Fastmail, set the forwarding rule up on the new side; the address itself doesn't change.

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