Recently Gmail has provided a new feature which allows their users to get around a problem which has been complained about for years .
The old problem was this: if you wanted to send emails from an email address that is not your Gmail email address, you had to accept the fact that many email clients would display the email as coming from “username@gmail.com On Behalf Of mycustomaddress@mydomain.com“.
To get around this problem, Gmail now lets you choose to send through a custom SMTP server. SMTP2Go’s SMTP server is an example of one that will work in this situation. You can use smtp2go.com as the custom SMTP server, choose to use either port 25 or 587 in the port dropdown box, and then enter your full billing email address as the username, and your password as the password.
To switch to this new method, go to the Accounts page under Settings, and click “edit info” next to the email address that you want to send from (in the “Send mail as” section). If you haven’t yet added this email address, click the “Send mail from another address button” and add it. Then choose the option to “Use your other email provider’s SMTP servers.”
This post explains the situation in more detail:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/send-mail-from-another-address-without.html
See the screenshot below which shows sample SMTP2Go settings which would work:
Note that if you are adding multiple different email addresses, you should still use your billing email address as the username in each case.
3 Comments
In my gmail account, these options don’t come up under “edit info”, the option “Use your other email provider’s SMTP servers” don’t appear. The only thing I can choose is Name and Email address. This is the same regardless of whether I am using the new or the older version of Gmail, and happens both when using Firefox and Chrome. What am I doing wrong?
Niklas – you firstly need to actually add the email address that you want to be able to send from, by clicking the button that says “Send mail from another address” on the “Accounts and Import” page.
FYI, I set this up with my work email and it worked great for sending email but had a problem with receiving. This was not smtp2go fault but had to do with my work server setup. It seemed to be related to the same issue so I thought that I would post the solution. Simple – setup your work account in gmail as POP instead of IMAP. You can still keep the IMAP setting enabled in gmail to sync the accounts (folders etc) but the pop will bring in all received email.
Thanks smpt2go, this service works great.