A silly tip that has saved me tons of hours and make clients happy is having an Email domain that has “catch-all” routing on it.
Basically this is having a domain that any address that you use with it automatically routes to a central email address, mine is the “energywins.co.uk” domain, anything you send to that domain ends up at my main address, be it “clientTest1@energywins.co.uk” or “fakeUser200@energywins.co.uk”, this did not used to be that useful when all apps were internal, but in the world of cloud apps and PARTICULARLY with the Salesforce/Pardot world that only allows an email to be registered once it is invaluable and helps you to keep clients separated (they also love to have you use emails address that are specific to them ie “MicrosoftTEST@energywins.co.uk”
This can be done easily with just about any email provider, but I use Gmail for domains as it is easy, fast and cheap1.
Strangely the Gmail for Domain instructions keep changing, are oddly poor for Google and the setting is buried REALLY deep which I assume means they don’t really want you to do it. so if things change, just search for “Gmail Catch All” in the meantime:
- From your inbox, Click on the little cog on the right-hand side and select “Manage this Domain”
- Then select “Apps”
- Then select “G Suite”
- Then select “Gmail”
- Then scroll down to the bottom and select “Advanced Settings”
- Then scroll nearly down to the bottom and under “Routing” you will see the setting for “Email routing”, change the radio button for “Unknown mailbox account messages” to “Route to catch-all address”, and put in your main email address for this domain.
That’s it, for most people this is not a suitable setting because it just slightly increases your spam content, but for me and anyone who needs a constant stream of individual email address and to not lose track of old ones used one 6 months ago, it’s invaluable.
- Some of my colleges use temp email domains such as http://www.throwawaymail.com but I have found that such things have a habit of being needed again in 6 months when the client comes back for more work.[↩]
