Forwarding your existing mailbox

Your vendors already have an address for you. It is printed on their remittance templates, saved in their billing systems and typed from memory by the bookkeeper at the plumbing firm. You are not going to change all of that by sending one email, and you should not try.

This page is for whoever administers that mailbox. It explains why forwarding is the route into inletAP, walks the setup at the three providers most property managers run, and ends with the two checks that prove mail is arriving.

Why inletAP cannot receive mail for your own domain

Mail for yourcompany.com goes wherever the MX records in your DNS say it goes, and those records are yours. Whoever holds them — Google, Microsoft, your IT provider — decides what happens to every message addressed to you.

inletAP receives mail on domains it controls. Your workspace gets its own subdomain of inlet-ap.com, and every intake mailbox lives on it:

ap@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com

No vendor can take delivery of mail addressed to a domain it does not run, and any that claims otherwise is describing a DNS change you would have to make anyway. Forwarding is the honest version of the same thing: your provider keeps control of your domain, and hands inletAP a copy of what arrives.

What arrives when you forward

A forwarded message reaches inletAP with your intake mailbox as the envelope recipient. That is what decides which workspace and which mailbox the message belongs to.

The From header is a different matter, and it is worth understanding because your rules read it.

inletAP reads the sender as a parsed address, so a rule matching contains "@bluepointhvac.com" works on the address itself rather than on the display name wrapped around it. If your team forwards invoices by hand, write your rules on something that survives the forward — the vendor, the amount, a property alias — rather than on the sender.

Attachments and body text are pulled out of the MIME structure server-side, so a forwarded chain with the invoice three replies down is still read.

Before you start

• You need to administer the mailbox you are forwarding FROM. Every step below happens in your own mail provider, signed in as that mailbox or as an administrator of it. Nobody at inletAP can set a forward for you.
• You need the intake address to forward INTO. It is listed under Settings → Mailboxes, with a Copy button beside it. Only an Admin can add a new one; everybody else can read the list.
• On Microsoft 365, check the outbound policy first. Automatic forwarding to an outside address is blocked by default there, and the bounce goes to the vendor rather than to you. The Microsoft 365 section below says what to change.
• Allow for your provider's confirmation step. Google verifies the destination before any mail flows. Plan to finish the setup in inletAP, not only in Gmail.

1. Choose which mailbox to forward into

Forward the portfolio-wide ap@ mailbox into your catch-all intake address. If you have created a building-specific mailbox, forward that building's address into it.

ap@yourcompany.com          ->  ap@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com
lakeshore@yourcompany.com   ->  lakeshore@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com

That second line is the argument for per-property mailboxes. Mail arriving at a building's address is coded to that building when the invoice itself names nothing recognizable, which covers the depressing number of invoices that identify the property only by a job number the vendor invented.

Copy the address from Settings → Mailboxes rather than retyping it. A mailbox that never takes any mail is usually a typo in a forwarding rule somewhere else.

2. Set the forward at your provider

These screens belong to Google and Microsoft, not to us, and they change without notice. The paths below are the ones each provider documents today, and every one of them is linked to the provider's own help page. If what you see does not match, trust the provider's page over this one.

Gmail and Google Workspace

One mailbox at a time, done by whoever can sign in to it (Google's instructions):

1. Open Gmail on a computer, in the account the mail arrives in today.
2. Top right, open Settings, then See all settings.
3. Open the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
4. Press Add a forwarding address, enter your inletAP intake address, and confirm.
5. Google emails a verification message to that address. Open it in inletAP — step 3 below — and follow it.
6. Back in the same Gmail tab, refresh, choose Forward a copy of incoming mail to, and pick what happens to Gmail's own copy. Most finance teams keep it, so the original stays where their retention policy expects it.
7. Press Save Changes.

A Google Workspace administrator has two further choices. Automatic forwarding under Gmail's end-user access settings decides whether users may do the above at all; it is on by default, and when it is off the option is not in Gmail for anyone. Separately, an administrator can forward a mailbox centrally with a recipient address map, which the user cannot then switch off, and which can also keep delivering to the original mailbox. Both are documented in Google's admin help.

Outlook.com

Signed in as the mailbox (Microsoft's instructions):

1. Open Settings, then Mail, then Forwarding. Depending on which version of the screen you get, the item may read Forwarding and IMAP.
2. Select Enable forwarding and enter your inletAP intake address.
3. Tick Keep a copy of forwarded messages unless you have a reason not to.
4. Press Save.

Outlook.com may ask you to turn on two-step verification, or to verify your identity, before it accepts the change. There is no confirmation email to the destination.

Microsoft 365

Read this part before you touch the menus. In Exchange Online, automatic forwarding to an external address is turned off by default by the outbound anti-spam policy. A blocked message does not stay in your mailbox and does not appear in inletAP: it bounces to the person who sent it, with 5.7.520 Access denied, Your organization does not allow external forwarding. Your vendor sees the failure and you do not, which is why this is the first thing to check rather than the last.

An administrator fixes it in the Microsoft Defender portal, under the anti-spam policies, by setting Automatic forwarding rules to On - Forwarding is enabled on an outbound policy scoped to the one mailbox or group that needs it. Microsoft documents the behavior and the setting on its external forwarding page. The remote domain settings have to permit automatic forwarding as well; any block beats any allow.

With that done, an administrator sets the forward itself from the Microsoft 365 admin center (Microsoft's instructions):

1. Open Users, then Active users, and select the mailbox.
2. Open the Mail tab, then Manage email forwarding.
3. Select Forward all emails sent to this mailbox and enter your inletAP intake address.
4. Choose whether to keep a copy in the mailbox.
5. Press Save changes.

A shared mailbox needs no license for this; a user mailbox does. One forwarding address is allowed per mailbox. The mailbox owner can set the same thing for themselves from Outlook on the web, under Settings, Mail, Forwarding — but the outbound policy above still governs whether it works.

Any other provider

Every serious mail host has a forwarding or redirect setting in the mailbox's own configuration. What you want is a plain forward of all incoming mail to the inletAP address. Avoid rules that forward only messages matching a subject or an attachment type: invoices arrive with subjects nobody predicted, and a filter that is 95% right quietly loses the other 5%.

3. Finish Google's confirmation, in inletAP

Google will not send a single message until its verification has been answered, and the verification is sent to the inletAP address rather than to you. This is where most setups stall.

That message is not an invoice, so inletAP sets it aside before extraction, in the state it calls filtered. Nothing is deleted and nothing is charged: the allowance counts invoices at extraction, and a filtered message never reaches it.

To find it, open Inbox and the Filtered tab. The table lists when each message arrived, who sent it, the subject and why it was set aside, and the search box reads all three — forwarding-noreply@google.com finds it. Open the subject.

A message from Google's forwarding address is recognized on this screen. It carries a Forwarding confirmation badge, a line saying Gmail is asking you to confirm — naming the mailbox being forwarded when the message states it — and a Confirm forwarding button when Google's own confirmation link is in the message. The button opens Google in a new tab; you may have to be signed in to the mailbox that is forwarding. The whole email is printed underneath, so if your provider sent a short code instead of a link, you can read it there and type it into the provider's screen.

Two things worth knowing. inletAP will not click that link for you — confirming a forward is the mailbox owner's decision, and a product that silently accepted mail redirects out of an email it had just declined to read would be doing something nobody asked for. And This is an invoice, the restore button on that screen, is the wrong control here: it is for a real invoice that was set aside by mistake.

Microsoft's confirmations are not badged, because no real Microsoft confirmation message has been captured to match on, and guessing at one would either badge ordinary notifications or promote the wrong link. If Microsoft asks you to confirm anything at the destination, it will be in the same Filtered tab, read the same way.

4. Check that mail is arriving

You should now be looking at the Filtered tab with the confirmation answered, and nothing else to do at your provider.

Now prove it, with a real message rather than a test one.

1. Send an invoice to your old address — or have a colleague do it — and open Inbox. It should appear as its own row, under the vendor's name, within a minute or two. A large scan takes longer than a short text invoice.
2. Read the mailbox counters. Each address under Settings → Mailboxes shows how many messages it has taken since it was created and when the last one arrived. Those two numbers are the fastest way to tell a silent forward from a quiet week, and the date is the one to read: an address you handed to twelve vendors whose last message is six weeks old is telling you something.

If nothing appears at all, why hasn't my invoice appeared? works through the causes in the order they usually turn out to be the answer.

The same message delivered twice is stored once: intake keys on the workspace, the Message-ID and a hash of the raw message, and a repeat is dropped at the door. A second copy — a colleague pressing Forward again, or a vendor sending a fresh email to both addresses — is a different message, so it arrives as its own document and Second Look raises a duplicate finding on it for a person to confirm. See duplicate detection.

The two-wave rollout

Nobody migrates an accounts payable inbox in one move. Most companies run two waves at once, which sounds like more work and is in fact less.

Both paths land in an inletAP mailbox, so both route correctly from the first day. There is no cut-over date, no freeze and no week where invoices are in two places.

Leave the forward running long after you think it is finished. A vendor who bills you annually will use the old address next spring regardless of what you told them this month.

Where to go next

• Intake addresses — what your subdomain is and how mailboxes are issued.
• Per-property mailboxes — creating an address per building, step by step.
• Your first coding rule — including rules on the sender address.
• Why hasn't my invoice appeared? — for when the forward is not doing what you think.