Two houses, one email address
Nov 27th, 2007 by Jill
Last year we set up a single email address for both of our houses. It instantly autoforwards to all of us (Kathy, G, and me) at our individual email accounts. It’s the email address we give to the kids’ schools, summer camp and extracurricular organizations, and this way we all know that everyone gets all of the information about what’s happening when.
Here’s how we did it:
- We went to http://groups.google.com and created a group.
- An email address for our group was automatically created. Any messages sent to this email address automatically post to the group’s message board.
- All three of us signed up to have messages posted to the group’s message board instantly forwarded to our private email addresses.
- We set our privacy level so that only we three could see the group message board, but so that anyone who knew our group’s email address could post messages.
- We also went to http://gmail.google.com and created a shorter email address that autoforwards to the longer group email address. This step isn’t really necessary, but it does have a great spam filter built in and it makes for an easier to remember email address. This is the email address we most often give out to the kids’ schools and the kids’ friends’ parents. Messages sent here forward to the group email address, which posts the message to the message board, which automatically forwards copies of the message to the three of us.
Even though it was a little complicated to set up, it’s an easy system to use once it’s in place and it helps keep us all on the same page.
Related posts:
You guys really amaze me with your incredible coparenting.
Bravo to you. Truly.
That is a creative use of a group. Guess I could do that with a Yahoo group or a Google group if I could get everyone to sign on to an e-mail account
This is such a great idea! I’ve posted a link on my blog and forwarded your post to several divorced moms I know.
This is a great idea. We are always looking for ways to simplify information gathering. It seems silly to expect others to contact multiple people at different web addresses when the technology exists to combine them. Now if it could only be done with telephones. (have 1 number for the school to call and all get text messages!!) Thanks for the helpful info!
I know. Sometimes I think it would be neat to have one of those secretarial services — the kind that lawyers hanging out their own shingles often hire. We could have someone working out of their house who could answer the phone for us, distribute messages to all of us, connect the caller to whoever would be best for them to talk to based on what they need, and also receive our mail and send us all PDF’s or hard copies.
[...] points of contact related to their kids, as well as to communicate with each other. Here’s the post about how to set up the email account and how it works. (The blog has lots of other interesting [...]
[...] addition to our single email address, we’ve also set up an online calendar we can all access. We use Google Calendar, which lets [...]