That Annoying “On Behalf Of” Gmail Feature
August 10th, 2009
Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we adopted gmail as a central repository for the multitude of email accounts that we use (currently nine of them). The switch was made several years ago, primarily for gmail’s superior spam filtering and the fact that the cloman.com server kept appearing on spam blacklists (one of the downsides of shared hosting). When using gmail to send a message from a non-gmail account, however, it puts your gmail address in the “Sender:” field of the message header. Certain email clients do not handle this well. Some versions of Outlook, for example, will say that the message is from “xyz@gmail.com On Behalf Of xyz@cloman.com”. Even worse some clients use the gmail address as the reply address, which is something I do not want and which defeats the purpose of using the cloman.com account in the first place. Simply put, this feature is annoying.
Google will not remove the “Sender:” field because its use is in accordance with email standards, but they now provide a workaround where you can use gmail to send messages from a different server. Thus I could, for example, use my cloman.com SMTP server from within gmail. In this case the “Sender:” field is omitted, and the problem is solved.
Astute readers will have immediately recognized that this doesn’t solve my core issue, which is that the cloman.com SMTP server appears on some spam blacklists. So I continue to use gmail’s server to send my cloman.com mail. But I have email accounts in other domains for which I am using this new feature.
Link: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/…
(via Lifehacker)
