Set up automatic forwarding (Gmail)

Every month your strategy publishes a signal by email. Once, you set Gmail to forward that email to your personal SignalDay ingest address. From then on, every month’s signal arrives in SignalDay before you’ve even opened your inbox.

Automatic forwarding, not manual forwarding

This distinction is the whole game. Gmail has two ways to send an email somewhere else, and only one of them works.

• Automatic forwarding (what you want) — Gmail relays the original message. The strategy’s signature travels with it. SignalDay trusts the email because it can verify the signature.
• Manual forwarding (what breaks) — you hit the Forward button. Gmail builds a new message from your address. The original signature is gone. SignalDay refuses it, because a signal-shaped email from your Gmail address is exactly what an impostor would send.

If someone tells you “just forward the email to SignalDay,” they mean the automatic kind. The Forward button on a single message is the wrong one.

Your ingest address

Every SignalDay account has its own personal ingest address, shaped like:

[email protected]

You’ll see it on your first-signal screen and on the automation prompt after your first checklist. There’s a copy button next to it. Copy that exact address — it’s how SignalDay knows which account the email belongs to.

The Gmail steps

1. Open Gmail settings. Click the gear icon in the top-right and then See all settings.
2. Go to Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
3. Click Add a forwarding address. Paste your SignalDay ingest address ([email protected]). Click Next, then Proceed.
4. Confirm the address. Gmail will email a confirmation code — and it sends the code to the address you just entered. That address is your SignalDay ingest, so the code lands in SignalDay, not in your inbox. SignalDay recognises the Google confirmation email, pulls out the code, and shows it to you on-screen. Copy the code, paste it into the Gmail dialog, and the address is confirmed. (If nothing shows up in SignalDay after a minute, email [email protected].)
5. Create a filter — don’t switch on “forward all mail”. You want only your strategy’s emails forwarded, not everything you receive. Back in Gmail settings go to Filters and blocked addresses, click Create a new filter, and fill in the From: field with the strategy’s sender address (for AllocateSmartly that’s the address their signal emails come from). Click Create filter, tick Forward it to: and pick your SignalDay ingest address from the dropdown. Save.

That’s it. Next month’s signal will arrive in Gmail, get automatically relayed to SignalDay, and turn into a pending checklist waiting for you.

Common problems

• “SignalDay says my signal couldn’t be verified.” Almost always because a Forward-button forward slipped through instead of the auto-forward rule. Check that the filter is active and that your rule really is forwarding the strategy’s messages — the giveaway is that a manually-forwarded email will show your own address in Gmail’s “from” field once it lands in SignalDay’s ingest log.
• “I never got the Gmail confirmation code.” SignalDay pulls the code out of the Google confirmation email so it never displays as a normal signal. If the code screen didn’t appear within a couple of minutes of clicking Proceed in Gmail, email [email protected] with your SignalDay email address — Kurt can look up whether the code arrived.
• “I use Outlook / Fastmail / iCloud Mail, not Gmail.” The idea is identical: find your provider’s auto-forwarding setting, add your SignalDay ingest address as the destination, filter it to only the strategy’s sender. Every mainstream provider has this feature. The Forward button still doesn’t work anywhere.

What SignalDay does with the email

• Reads the allocation.
• Files it against your account.
• Waits for you to open SignalDay and turn it into a checklist.

SignalDay does not read anything else in your inbox. It only ever sees emails that Gmail forwards to your personal ingest address — and Gmail only forwards the ones your filter matches.