04/09/07 On behalf of
I use gmail for my both my personal and SnowyDay email. In fact, I use the same account for both, and have it set to be able to send email as my SnowyDay account. Works pretty well; all my email comes to the same place, I have the Google Notifier so it tells me right away when I have new mail, and I can check it anywhere I am, even from my cell phone. Great, huh?
Well, not so much.
Turns out that if you use your Gmail to send email as some other address, some email clients, don’t display the address you’re using, but the original one. So some people see something something like this when I email them:
Not good. Outlook does this, and Yahoo mail does something similar but without displaying the original Gmail address (it just says it’s from a Gmail account). Here, Google it to find more info.
It could be blamed on Microsoft instead of Gmail:
Actually GMail DOES NOT ADD “on behalf of …” The email has the From: address you specified. Every email client I have used then renders it correctly.
Except … MS Outlook & Outlook Express. MS does not render the specified From: field but replaces it with an artificially constructed result of the From: field and Sender: field. This is plainly wrong and IMHO breaks the net convention. But then this is food & drink for Home of the HTML Email.
So go easy on Google. They are the good guys here. It is MS who are the problem.
As much as i like to blame Microsoft for everything, I don’t blame them 100% for this. The original email is sent on the “sender” field anyway. Displaying this info on the “from” field is a bit too much, but it’s not like it was secret in the first place. You could have easily seen it by looking at the email header. The problem was always there, Outlook just made it more obvious.
That’s why I decided to try OS X’s Mail. I’m currently testing it with another email accout, and if it works like I want it to I’ll be dropping Gmail for my work email. Mostly I want to see if I can get a notifier a la Google Notifier, that works without the need to have Mail open all the time. And the abbility to be able to check it from my cell (wich I’ll be able to do once I get a phone that supports the good version of Opera mini).
Technorati Tags: Gmail, on behalf of, Yahoo mail, Mail, Opera mini
1 Comment so far
I had thought the same: “Great I can send everything through Gmail”, but yeah, I ran into the same problem. Thunderbird displays the alias, but most other mail clients don’t.
Which is a shame.
There are two ways around it that I’ve looked into:
1. I use thunderbird for all my mail accounts. Gmail pops all my received mail and thunderbird downloads it from there. I use filters to move incoming mail to the right place.
For sending mail it’s a little more complicated. Obviously my gmail account sends and receives through their server. For my other accounts what I do is send using the account email server, eg mail.pixelapes.com, but I add a rule to always bcc my gmail account. In gmail I set up a filter to label these bcc mails as Pixelapes Sent, and I have a final issue of all my mails being downloaded again by Thunderbird. No problem, just set up a filter to mark those incoming mails as read and move them to trash.
Now it’s a little bit of a weird way to have things going, but I know now that all of my email comes and goes through gmail, which is what I wanted, so everything is in one place.
2. I haven’t implemented this, but looked into it. Google Apps for your Domain. This would probably sort everything I can imagine.
By Alex Leonard on 05.24.07 7:59 am
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