Gmail removes ‘on behalf of’ text while sending mail from a non Gmail address

The users of Gmail’s custom “From:” option know well about the “Sender” field issue. The issue is that the receiver receives the message, sent by using this option, with a sender field as “From username@gmail.com On Behalf Of customaddress@mydomain.com “. This really annoyed many senders/ receivers.

The Gmail’s custom “From:” is used to send messages with user’s other email addresses listed in place of the Gmail address. Since these messages are sent through the Gmail’s server but “from” a non-Gmail address, Gmail includes the Gmail username in the “Sender” field of the message header to comply with mail delivery protocols. This also helps in preventing user’s mail address from being marked as spam.

Gmail has rectified the loud and clear “on behalf of” text. Instead of using Gmail’s server to send the email, Gmail now use the servers where users other email address lives. Since Gmail is not the originating domain there is no need to include “Sender” info in the header.

Now, if the users other email provider supports POP or IMAP access, the message sending will be as follow:

There is a little problem with the new method. What if the users want to carry on with the old method or if their other email does not support authenticated SMTP?

Emmanuel Pellereau, a software engineer at Google, said :

We recognize that your other address might not have a server that you can use to send outbound messages — for example, if you use a forwarding alias rather than an actual mailbox, or if your other email provider doesn’t support authenticated SMTP, or restricts access to specific IP ranges. For this reason, we’ve kept the original method as well. Check out our Help Center for further details on these two “send mail as” configuration options.

Pellereau also explained the procedure to switch to this new method as:

To switch to this new method, go to the Accounts page under Settings, and click “edit info” from the “Send mail as” section. Then choose the option to “Use your other email provider’s SMTP servers.”

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