I love Gmail.  Living without the bloat of Outlook is perhaps the most productive improvement I've made in the last twelve months, but one niggle remained – "sent on behalf of".[more]

When you have a gmail account, for example "bob123@gmail.com", but use it to send an email from a domain specific email, such as "bob.smith@thewidgetcompany.com" the recipient will see (in some clients, including Outlook) that the email came from "bob.smith@thewidgetcompany.com sent on behalf of bob123@gmail.com" which isn't terribly professional.

I realise this is part of the official email specification, but it isn't optional and it's just so clunky.  I want to make sure my clients know my email address as "bob.smith@thewidgetcompany.com" and not my private gmail address.

Until recently there was no way around this, but Google recently added the ability to send gmail mail through a specific SMTP server per email alias.  Problem solved:

  1. Log into gmail
  2. Click on Settings
  3. Click on Accounts
  4. At the end of your list of email aliases click  "edit info"
  5. A pop-up wizard will appear titled "Edit email address"
  6. Click Next Step until you get to the page entitled  "Send mail through your SMTP server?"
  7. Choose the second option: "send through thewidgetcompany.com SMTP servers"
  8. Specify the correct details for your own SMTP server, in the usual way (see picture below)
  9. Click "Save Changes" 

 

It works just great, and my final gmail niggle is solved.

 

by Matt Stanley-Webb

Tags: