This is the day I’ve been waiting for for a few years now – Gmail solves the “on behalf of” issue.
If you are not familiar with it, the essence of it is this. You can use Gmail to manage your other, non-Gmail mail accounts. You can either forward mail automatically to your Gmail inbox, or even set a POP3 fetching from a remote server. In Gmail account settings you can add all the email addresses that you use, and then even reply from those email addresses.
However, due to Gmail not managing your other email accounts directly, it is forced to add a Sender header with a Gmail email address in it. And some email programs, like MS Outlook either get confused by it or interpret it in a certain way. So, if you use your me@gmail.com email address to manage your me@work.com email, and you reply to a message using a me@work.com in From, your colleague’s MS Outlook will show the email to be from “me@gmail.com on behalf of me@work.com”. This is ugly and there was no easy work around this.
Today Google added support for external SMTP servers. This way, you can configure your Gmail to use mail.work.com SMTP server when you send from me@work.com . And it comes from me@work.com , not me@gmail.com on behalf of me@work.com .
With this feature, Gmail practically becomes a full featured email client with support for POP3 for incoming mail and SMTP for outgoing mail. And these are great news!
The “on behalf of” issue was keeping quite a few folks from moving all their email accounts to Gmail. And not that the problem is solved I think more people will move over. Good times!
A good SMTP server to use with this new Gmail feature is this one:
http://www.smtp2go.com/blog/gm.....tp-server/
Unfortunately i can’t get mine to work. I enter my SMTP settings, etc and all i get are errors. I contacted my host and they were unable to fix the problem. On the other hand, Yahoo Mail can do this with no problems. But i’d much rather use gMail.