Part 1: Setting Up Gmail Forwarding
Forwarding tells Gmail to send a copy of every incoming email to your Jelly inbox. This is how messages get into Jelly in the first place.
Gmail’s forwarding setup has a few more steps than you might expect, and it’s easy to miss one. We’ll go through this carefully.
1. Find Your Jelly Forwarding Address
Before you do anything in Gmail, you need to know where to forward emails to.
- Open Jelly
- Click your profile photo in the top-right corner
- Select Email Setup
- You’ll see your forwarding address displayed — it looks like
hello@your-team-name.sendtojelly.com - Copy this address (you’ll need it in a moment)
2. Open Gmail Settings
- Go to Gmail (mail.google.com)
- Click the gear icon in the top-right corner
- Click See all settings (not the quick settings panel — you need the full settings page)
- You should now be on a page with multiple tabs like “General”, “Labels”, “Inbox”, etc.
3. Add Your Jelly Address as a Forwarding Destination
- Click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab
- In the Forwarding section at the top, click Add a forwarding address
- Paste your Jelly forwarding address into the box
- Click Next
- A popup will appear asking you to confirm — click Proceed
- Click OK to dismiss the confirmation
At this point, Gmail has recorded that you might want to forward to this address, but forwarding is not enabled yet — Gmail needs to verify that you control the destination address first.
4. Confirm the Forwarding Request
Gmail sends a confirmation email to make sure you actually control the address you’re forwarding to. That confirmation email will arrive in Jelly.
- Switch over to Jelly
- Look in your inbox — you should see an email from Google with a subject like “Gmail Forwarding Confirmation”
- Open the email
- Click the confirmation link in the email (or use the confirmation code if provided)
If you can’t find the confirmation email: check Jelly’s spam folder, wait a minute and try again, or go back to Gmail settings and click to resend the confirmation.
5. Enable Forwarding (This Is Where People Get Stuck!)
Adding a forwarding address doesn’t turn forwarding on. You must also enable it.
- Go back to Gmail → Settings → See all settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab
- Important: Reload the page. The forwarding address you just verified might not appear until you refresh.
- The forwarding address will be an empty box again. Thanks Google! Type in your Jelly forwarding address again, and click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.
If you don’t click Save Changes, forwarding won’t be enabled!
- You should now see the forwarding address set, with a temporary message at the top of the page confirming it.
- Next to that, choose what Gmail should do with the original message. We recommend keep Gmail’s copy in the Inbox
6. Test That Forwarding Works
- Send a test email to your Gmail address from a different email account (not the same Gmail account)
- Wait a few seconds
- Check Jelly — the test email should appear in your inbox
If it doesn’t, double-check the steps above, especially that you clicked Save Changes.
Troubleshooting
Emails not arriving in Jelly
If the Gmail confirmation email never showed up:
- Check Jelly’s spam folder
- Wait a minute and try sending the confirmation again from Gmail settings
- Make sure you entered the Jelly forwarding address correctly
If forwarding seems set up but emails aren’t arriving:
- Go to Gmail settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP and verify forwarding is enabled (the “Forward a copy” option is selected)
- Make sure you clicked Save Changes
- Reload the settings page and check again
If only some emails are arriving:
- Check if you have Gmail filters that might prevent certain messages from being forwarded
- Some newsletters and automated emails might be affected by existing filters
Spam not arriving in Jelly
By default, Gmail doesn’t automatically forward spam messages, and so anything Google flags as spam will remain in your Gmail/Google Workspace account’s Spam folder
If you want Jelly to receive the spam messages, you’ll have to set up forwarding in a different way, using a “filter”, with the “never consider messages spam” option selected.
Next: Set up sending
Now that you have your incoming emails flowing from your Gmail account into Jelly, let’s configure Jelly to be able to send replies using your email address: