31st
Gmail finally lets you send email by proxy without revealing the Gmail account you’re actually using. That sounds suspicious, but it’s really quite a respectable practice. If you have your normal Gmail account linked up with other Gmail accounts so you can receive and send emails all in one place, this update clears up one of the little annoyances with the sending part.
For example, if you like to use personal-me@gmail.com as your go-to for all your email but you also have another identity for your professional self, say, pro-me@mydomain.com, it’s handy to link up the accounts so you can receive and send at one place, namely Gmail. But when you send from your pro identity or respond to an email sent to your pro identity, your Gmail account is betrayed in that message’s header (each message essentially has this delivery tracking log).
Most email reading software and interfaces (clients) don’t display stuff from this header, but your secret sending identity is revealed by a few, namely Microsoft Outlook, which reveals you for who you are and where you actually came from. That’s annoying if you’re trying to keep personal and business affairs separate and especially annoying if you don’t want potential employers to google your personal screenname and pull up all those embarrassing pics and rants.
Now that’s been solved by letting Gmail actually send the message from the other account’s email server so there needn’t be any trace of your personal account in any headers. Brilliant!
If you have Gmail accounts (including free Google Apps plugged into your own domain), here’s how you fix up the improved proxy sending. (Technically speaking, it’s not actually proxy behind the scenes anymore, it’s like the opposite of proxy.)
Go to Settings and under Accounts, find the account you want to send from and click “edit info.” Hit “Next” to skip to SMTP stuff and change the SMTP server to “smtp.gmail.com” (without quotes); Gmail and Google Apps use the same server. Type your full email address as your username, enter your password, and why not check SSL while you’re there. Done.
