Copy client email with an admin rule

If your email runs on your own domain through Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, one rule in your admin console can copy every email your clients send you into roster, automatically. Your mail is still delivered to you as usual; roster gets a copy. You need admin access to your domain, or you can send this page to whoever looks after it.

Before you start

In the roster app, open Settings → Email → Forwarding filter and tap Show me how. Under Your own domain, copy two things:

  1. Your private forwarding address, which ends in @keeproster.com. Keep it to yourself: mail sent to it is filed under your clients.
  2. Your client pattern. It lists your clients' email addresses in a form both admin consoles accept, for example ^(olivia@example\.com|ben@studio\.co)$.

Only mail from those addresses is copied. Everything else in your inbox stays private.

Google Workspace

  1. Sign in to the Google Admin console as an administrator and go to Menu → Apps → Google Workspace → Gmail → Routing.
  2. On the Routing setting, click Configure (or Add another rule if you already have one).
  3. Give it a name, for example "Copy client email to roster".
  4. Under Select when this action is applied, tick Inbound messages only.
  5. Under the action, choose Modify message, tick Add more recipients, click Add, and paste your private forwarding address.
  6. Under Envelope filter, tick Only affect specific envelope senders, choose Pattern match, and paste your client pattern.
  7. Click Save. Google says changes can take up to 24 hours, though usually much less.

Microsoft 365

  1. Sign in to the Exchange admin center at admin.exchange.microsoft.com and go to Mail flow → Rules.
  2. Click Add a rule → Create a new rule and give it a name, for example "Copy client email to roster".
  3. Under Apply this rule if, choose The sender → address matches any of these text patterns, and paste your client pattern.
  4. Under Do the following, choose Add recipients → to the Bcc box, and enter your private forwarding address.
  5. Click Next. Set Rule mode to Enforce, then Next, Finish and Done.
  6. New rules can start out disabled. Open the rule from the list and, if it shows Disabled, switch it on. Microsoft says a rule can take 30 minutes or more to start working.

When you add a client

The rule only knows the clients in the pattern you pasted. When you add a client in roster, copy the new pattern from the same card and paste it over the old one in your rule. Until then, a new client's email only reaches roster when you reply through it or Bcc add@keeproster.com.

Good to know

It copies incoming mail only. Don't add a rule that copies the email you send: replies you write in the roster app, or send to a client's roster address, are already recorded. And never point a rule at add@keeproster.com, because that would add everyone you email as a client.

Nothing arriving? Wait out the delay above, then send yourself a test from a client address in the pattern. On Microsoft 365, if the test bounces with 5.7.520 Access denied, your organisation blocks forwarding outside the company: your admin can allow it in the outbound spam policy (Microsoft Defender). Mail from a client address that isn't in your pattern isn't copied. Mail that gets copied but doesn't match a client shows up in your roster review list.

To stop, delete or disable the rule. Questions: support@keeproster.com.