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!
August 15th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
This new Gmail feature still needs an SMTP server to work. I’ve found one that talks about this: http://www.smtp2go.com/blog/gmail-on-behalf-of-smtp-server/