Last month Batman decided he was too busy to keep track of a separate batman@batcave.com email inbox. Especially since the economic downturn had forced him to lay off Alfred.
So he forwarded all of his batman@batcave.com email to his gmail account, brucewayne@gmail.com. (Sshh! Nobody knows.)
At first this was almost but not quite awesome. In fact, Batman spent a month wondering if gmail was just another impractical, slow-moving, overly talkative attempt to kill him. But as he mastered the ropes the brilliance of using gmail for multiple identities became clear.
Batman may be a loner, but he does appreciate the value of teamwork. So for the rest of you superheroes out there, here are Batman’s three crucial steps for multiple identity management in gmail:
1. You need to know who you are. Messages addressed to a particular identity need to be easily recognizable. You can achieve this quickly with gmail’s filters feature:
Click Settings -> Filters -> Create a New Filter
Enter the identity’s email address in the “To:” field
Click Next Step
Check “Apply the label”
Select “New Label”
Enter a descriptive label like “Batman” or “batcave”
Click “Create Filter.”
Now you can painlessly distinguish your Batman emails from your Bruce Wayne emails. In addition to showing up with a visible label in your regular inbox view, you can also filter to just a particular label by clicking on it in the left-hand column.
2. GMail needs to know who you are. When you reply to a message sent to a particular identity, you want your reply to come from that identity’s email address, not your personal email address. And you don’t want to be forced to select that manually – it needs to be the default or you’ll soon be having conversations about work at your personal address.
To set this up:
Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Send Mail As
Click “Send mail from another address”
Add batman@batcave.com
You can configure gmail to use your own domain’s mail servers rather than just sending through gmail. The former takes a bit more work, but it does keep your personal email address out of the headers completely, so it may be worth the effort for you. In practice hardly anybody looks at the headers closely, just as hardly anybody notices that Batman and Bruce Wayne have exactly the same build. Smoke and mirrors, baby.
Now, here’s the bit I missed the first time: you’re not done yet. You want to make sure that replies automatically come from the identity under which you received the message.
To fix that:
Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Send Mail As
Under “When receiving a message,” select “Reply from the same address the message was sent to.”
The default is to always send mail as your personal address, which is not what you want.
You can also choose to send messages from any of your configured addresses when composing new messages that are not replies. It’s important to keep in mind that your personal identity is still the default for new messages that are not replies (unless you change the default, of course).
3. If you use web forms that send you email, you want your replies to go to the right person. If you have set up various web forms that allow citizens to contact you in the event of a Joker attack, you are probably using the “Reply-To” field to indicate the citizen who should get your replies. More than likely the “From” field is defaulting to batman@batcave.com… the same address Bruce configured gmail to send mail from when he’s Batman.
Unfortunately, gmail has a quirk: if the “From” line of the message you’re replying to happens to be one of your “send mail from” addresses, gmail will ignore the “Reply-To” line, even though it shows up in “Show Details.” This is completely baffling and guaranteed to drive you insane, which is exactly what the Joker wants. (“Don’t Be Evil” is just a front, right?)
The solution is simple: change the “From” line of the emails you’re receiving from your web forms. If you coded those forms, you should be able to override the “From” line. In PHP it looks like this:
mail('batman@batcave.com (Batman)',
$s,
$body,
"From: support@batcave.com\r\n" .
"Reply-To: $e");
When we set the “from” address to something other than batman@batcave.com, gmail magically decides to honor the “Reply-To” field, and gotham is safe.
Aaaand that’s it! DANANANANANANANANA! You’re ready to fight crime.
labels.