Sometime ago I wrote about the Gmail on behalf of issue. In that post I stated that:

It does appear to be an issue that cannot be changed within Gmail. In summary it appears to be an issue with the way Microsoft Outlook displays the “from” field.

And at the time of writing that was the correct answer. Things have changed however. Yesterday Google announced that they could solve this problem for some users.

The issue stems with Google ensuring that they comply with mail delivery protocols and showing exactly where the email has come from. That is, that the email was sent from your Gmail account not directly from the server of your actual email address.

“Instead of using Gmail’s servers to send the message, we’ll use the servers where your other email address lives. Since Gmail isn’t the originating domain, we don’t have to include “Sender” info in the header. No more “on behalf of.” From Gmail Blog

That’s great you say, but what do I do to my gmail account to fix it. Follow the steps below, but do note that this may not work in 100% of cases:

“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.” Source: Gmail Blog

Unfortunately my email provider does restrict access to specific IP ranges, so it hasn’t solved this issue for me, but thought I would share it with you, in case in could help you!

Step 1 - Settings Menu

Click on the settings menu as highlighted by the red arrow.

Step 2 - Accounts Menu

Click on the accounts menu as highlighted by the red arrow.

Step 3 - Edit Info

You should now have a list of all the accounts that Gmail fetches emails from. Click edit info on the account that you would like to remove the “on behalf of” from, as highlighted by the red arrow. It will then take you to the screen below. Simply click on next step.

Step 4 - Send mail through your SMTP server

Click the radio button to send through your email providers SMTP servers and save changes.

Now when you send email from this account, it will not be labeled as being sent on behalf of!

Technorati Tags: gmail, Set Up Email Address

By now you would have noticed the changes the label set up in Gmail. If you were like me then one day when you entered Gmail a couple of weeks ago, you would have noticed that the majority of your labels had disappeared. It once looked like this:

And now it looks like:

So where have the rest of your labels gone? Near the red arrow is an option saying xx more. By clicking on this you will be able to access the rest of your labels. But what if you want to have more labels easily accessible in the left side bar? Simple, follow these instructions and you can change what labels appear in your Gmail account.

1. Settings Menu

From the main page of your set up gmail account, click on the settings tab, as highlighted by the red arrow.

2. Label’s Menu

From the Settings Option, click on the Label’s Menu as highlighted by the red arrow.

3. Organising Labels

As illustrated above, you will now see all your labels listed in this tab. Next to each label is the word show and hide.

4. Hidden Labels

As highlighted by the red arrow, you can see that the label for football has “hide” in bold. This means that it is hidden. If you wish to have this label appear directly in your left hand side bar, click on “show” and it will appear.

5. Show Labels

The alternative way to organise your labels is to use the drag and drop functionality that Gmail now offers. However, when wanting to organise multiple labels, using the Label’s menu is a much quicker and easier way to arrange the labels that you want shown.

Simply go through you list of labels and click “show”on the ones you want to be seen and then hide any you don’t need to see, bu clicking on “hide”.

Technorati Tags: gmail, labels, Set Up Email Address