Oh no you don't, G-mail!

February 21, 2010 4:21 PM

Can an e-mail forwarded to a g-mail account be replied from that account but appear to the receiver as sent from the previous address? How?

I received an e-mail that was forwarded from my campus e-mail address to a g-mail account that I currently operate with. All e-mails sent to my campus e-mail are forwarded to this address and then immediately deleted.

I want to reply in my g-mail account to this e-mail, but when the receiver gets the message, I would like him/her to see my campus e-mail address. Is this possible? Thanks.

posted by anonymous to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Best answer: Try this: Gmail settings > Accounts and Import .. There's a section to 'Send Mail As.' Click the 'Send Mail From Another Address' button and follow the directions.

Then when you reply to that email, you will be able to select which email address you want to send from.

That should work.
posted by alligatorman at 4:24 PM on February 21, 2010

You can also choose a setting that lets you always reply fom the address the email was sent to.
posted by lunasol at 4:26 PM on February 21, 2010

alligatorman has the right answer - I've used it for several years for my old university email.
posted by ish__ at 4:28 PM on February 21, 2010

I have other gmail addys dump into my main gmail, and when I hit reply to those that were dumped into the main account from other gmail accounts there is a link next to the 'from' that lets me select which account to reply from.

If your account isn't linked I doubt this would work, though.
posted by cestmoi15 at 4:29 PM on February 21, 2010

The mail's headers will still be marked "sent on behalf of (GMail account name)", however, and some e-mail programs (some Outlooks, if I remember right) will show this as FROM... so don't count on this to be perfectly transparent.
posted by rokusan at 4:33 PM on February 21, 2010 [2 favorites]

Something else you might want to do, if you're using a Gmail account to consolidate several email addresses, is have Gmail pull mails from your other accounts using POP3, rather than having the other accounts push mail to Gmail via forwarding.

This might occasionally cause a minor delivery delay, but it has several advantages:

• All your mail accounts as well as all your mails can get managed using a single Gmail signon, instead of needing to visit multiple webmail facilities.
• Gmail can reliably label POP3-fetched mails without needing filters based on destination address, so external accounts having address aliases or that regularly receive bulk mails etc. via bcc work much better.
• Even accounts managed by abominations such as Outlook Web Access that offer no forwarding method that doesn't munge up the headers can usually be accessed cleanly this way.

posted by flabdablet at 7:20 PM on February 21, 2010

You have the option to disable that.

That only works if your alternate address's smtp server will be reachable by google. For many organizations, the server is firewalled, so you'd have to be onsite or connected through a VPN, neither of which gmail can do.
posted by chrisamiller at 7:40 AM on February 22, 2010

Looks like the OP has already found and exercised the appropriate option.
posted by flabdablet at 6:53 PM on February 22, 2010