Gmail has offered the ability to specify different emails that you own as the “From:” address for a long time. This makes consolidating emails easy. When combined with forwarders, one account could handle the emailing of multiple addresses. However, some recipients see a very ugly “From:” address when using this method.
This is because since Gmail is now sending the email instead of the original mail server, it must include the actual Gmail address in the mail headers.
- Delivered-To: recipient@domain.com
- Return-Path: <real@gmail.com>
- MIME-Version: 1.0
- Sender: real@gmail.com
- Subject: email
- From: Chen Shen<new@cshen.ca>
- To: recipient@domain.com
A while ago Google introduced a new function that solves this by routing emails through the actual server of the alternate address. I’ve only recently set it up with my own account, and found the relevant information scattered around the web. This is a compilation of my search results.
The Setup Process
The first step is the same as before, go to the Gmail settings page and add a new email address.
On the next step, there is an option to route emails through the alternate server in addition to the traditional method of simply spoofing the “From:” field. Once this option is selected the details of the SMTP server could be specified.
A verification email will be sent to the alternate account, and the process is complete after confirmation.
The SMTP Settings
I set this up on two different servers. Google Apps for my own domain, and SFU Connect for my university account.
For Google Apps, the details are as follows:
- SMTP Server:
smtp.gmail.com - Port:
465 - Username:
username@domain.tld - Always use SSL: yes
And the settings for SFU Connect are auto-detected, which are:
- SMTP Server:
mailgate.sfu.ca - Port:
465 - Username: SFU Computing ID
- Always use SSL: yes
Other Things to Know
- While this will allow Gmail to send emails as other addresses, the other accounts need to be forwarding mail to the Gmail account for two-way communication to work.
- When routing through Google Apps, it rewrites the outgoing address to the actual email address of the account being used. So if the account has an alias, it will not be used as the “From:” address. For example, if the email account is admin@domain.com with an alias of me@domain.com, adding me@domain.com as an alternate email will not work. The recipient will always see admin@domain.com since the email is being routed through there. SFU Connect does not enforce this, and therefore it is possible to use both computing-id@sfu.ca as well as first.last@sfu.ca as alternate addresses.
- Google Apps also stores routed emails in the sent folder. This may be useful since a full conversation history could be stored in the alternate account as well. A filter will need to be set up to delete sent emails if you do not wish to retain them. SFU Connect also doesn’t do this, so there will still only be half (incoming) of a conversation stored on SFU’s server.
- Since the email is now being sent by other servers, sending an email from an alternate address to the same alternate address will not place it in the inbox. If this is a Google Apps account, the email will be found in the inbox of the Google Apps account, since it actually sent the email to itself (unless, of course, there’s a filter to delete sent mail).
- It is also possible to use Gmail’s SMTP server with other services. This is the same server as Google Apps, but the username would – naturally – simply be a Google account and not custom domain account.