Friday, March 22, 2024

Google Workspace Routing: gmail pro catch-all routing

 I like to do this dumb thing where I use unique email addresses per service.  It started to thwart organizations from selling my email address, but now everything has been breached it has a unique benefit that I don't have the same username at every site so searching through my password manager is fast and also having someone try to login as `microsoft@example.com` but on google has nothing to do with my real account.

Well, I've moved my DNS registrar and name servers around a bit now that Google Domains has been sold.  Up shot is CloudFlare Domain Name Registration is a little cheaper and their API is very easy to deal with if you wanna do a roll your own Dynamic DNS service or something.

When I moved DNS some of my emails started to bounce :(

Looks like there was a gmail default route for "Google Domains Email Forwarding" but I couldn't find anything about it in the docs Set up Default routing for your organization which I think I was using before but now was no longer able to route since I wasn't using Google Domains?

The changes I made were for All Recipients > Envelope recipient > Change envelope recipient > Recipient username > my_username

When tested this seemed to give the result I wanted where the previously bounced emails like `foo@example.com` now was getting sent to `my_username@example.com`.

I thought I would share it here in case I forget and need to do it again.  I have other default routes for other domains and one of them adds a recipient instead of changing the recipient and that kinda dirties the email headers (more than they are now) but it's also a way.