Setting up Google Mail but with different address

I would love to upgrade to the Premium service but I wanted to check with you first whether my desired configuration is possible. I currently use GMail to get work email to my iPhone. My co. doesn't support the iPhone and that's my only work-around to getting @work.com email to my iPhone. I have registered the @work.com email with GMail, which allows me to use either my Gmail regular login or @work.com login. I can also send emails out of GMail under my @work.com alias. I was also able to configure my IMAP Gmail setup on the iPhone to use my @work.com email address, and therefore when I send emails from my iPhone is shows that I sent them from my @work.com email alias. This all allows me to maintain a professional work image, while using GMail to route work emails to my iPhone.

I hope I was able to explain my setup above. My question is can I replicate the same with NS Premium push service, i.e. instead of using my @gmail.com account to be able to setup my iPhone with the @work.com account so that when I create and send new messages from the iPhone they look like they were sent from my @work.com alias.

Wanted to confirm if you know more about this before I jump and sign up for the upgrade.

I am doing this myself. When you configure your active sync account on the iphone, your email address is different then your account name it uses to connect to nuevasyncs servers. So I put my alternative address which is my default (added) address on gmail web.

The only thing I am unclear about what you do, is how did you give yourself the ability to login to gmail with your @work.com login. I added my alternative account to Send mail as: in Account Settings. And I made it my default address. But I cannot login as that account.

Correct, we take the phone-supplied sender address and use that (unless for some reason it is obviously broken , for example an empty string).

The service has the capability for the sender address to be overridden by a field in the user record (not the same field as your 'registered e-mail address').
We don't yet have UI for this on the web site but it will be coming soon.

The story as to why you can't just change your registered e-mail address (although note it has nothing to do with sender address), is that we need to verify it (send an e-mail, have the user click through a URL in the message, etc). The service as originally designed would set your account to 'not enabled' until the verification had been done. This means that if we just added UI for self-serve e-mail address changes, some users would end up breaking their sync because the account would go into the disabled state (which stops sync from working).

Anyway, we're planning to fix this soon but in the meantime we're happy to change e-mail addresses for anyone who contacts support.

Does that mean that I need to send you an email with the request. I am already doing this and never officially requested it from you. I did go through this with gmail originally.

Allan

allanweinman wrote:Does that mean that I need to send you an email with the request. I am already doing this and never officially requested it from you. I did go through this with gmail originally.

No. The only reason to send such a request is if the registered address no longer works (because one day we might e-mail you, or you might want to do password recovery). The sender address for outgoing mail comes from the device, and can be completely different.

@allanweinman: Thanks for replying and letting me know it works with the device set up you outlined. I will give it a try tomorrow and I hope I got the instructions correctly. I will just put the @work.com email in the device's Email Address during set up, but input NuevaSync's login info for their server.

As far as the Google login with the secondary account, I think this was detailed somewhere on their site. But once you register that secondary email (@work.com) with Gmail, it associates it with your @gmail.com account and it allows you to interchangeably use it instead of the Gmail username (same password!).

I stumbled upon it when I was trying to get their Goolge Calendar Sync to work with my Outlook at work. Somewhere on their support forums they detailed this out. Registering the work account and loging in with it was the only way to get events synced, in which you are the organizer or attendee. This login works across all of their sites - Calendar, Finance, Reader, etc.

@dboreham: Thank you as well for the quick response. I don't think I need to change my registered address, because I want your system to recognize me as a Gmail user. I also sync my Google Calendar with it. I will input the @work.com in the device and hope that outgoing email and replies will get sent from that address through the push service. That's how I have the IMAP currently setup, but I hope it works with NuevaSync Exchange simulation too. Look out for me as a Premium user.

Please excuse me if I am asking a stupid question, but with the options described above you cannot easily toggle between your @gmail and your @work addresses when sending email from the iPhone, correct? I mean if you have multiple email accounts registered on the phone then when you send email you generally have an option to pick the “from” address. Can you mimic the same behavior with gmail (assuming you have additional email registered within your gmail account) via nuevasync?

That's correct, in order to 'flip' reply addresses you need to edit the sender address on the phone. Having done this myself a few times it's not pleasant.
We have a cunning plan which is to have the service remember which recipients you communicate with at which address, then when you reply it would
pick the right one. This may be too cunning a plan by half though, because if there's even a 0.1% chance of getting it wrong, then it'd be useless.

Just wanted to report back to the thread I started. I upgraded to the Premium Service and set up the Gmail Push service.

On NuevaSync's page, I entered my Gmail credentials and established the link. However, during the setup on the iPhone in the Email Address field I entered the @work.com email address and then the proper server login info for NuevaSync. Now, when I create new messages, the From field is my @work.com, so I maintain some semblance of professional image by faking my work email through GMail. True enough, in Outlook or Blackberry, the emails show that they were sent by "@gmail.com on behalf of @work.com" therefore revealing my trickery, but at least when people hit reply, and overall if they don't pay attention, they only see my @work.com address.

That, of course, is an issue with GMail. I've heard of other - paid, however - IMAP email service providers that allow you to completely replace the From header with your alternative email address, but GMail only appends it to their gmail.com address and therefore it shows this "on behalf of" message. Maybe, now that NuevaSync supports general IMAP push for any proper IMAP IDLE accounts, I may investigate whether I should use one of those paid services to upgrade my "professional image." Than again, it would be nice for my company to just get on with the times and support the iPhone, so I don't have to jump through such hoops.

Thanks to David and Allan for their contribution to this thread and answering my questions.

Hi, have you tried adding your work address in GMail as a valid sender address ?
Look in GMail under 'settings', then the 'accounts' tab, and click 'Add another email address you own'.

Of course. This is the first step towards using other email addresses/aliases via Gmail.

What's unfortunate is that GMail adds two fields to the outgoing email when you use aliases. One field called "From" which is your non-Gmail, but registered email, and one field called "Sender", which is your @gmail address. Most email readers just show the From field, but Outlook takes both fields and creates the sequence "Sender (@gmail) on behalf of From (@work)". This is kind of annoying because it is not very professional as well as a potential privacy concern if you don't want people to know your Gmail address when you are techinically addressing them from another email address. But Google so far is standing very firm that they need to add both the Sender and From fields. They claim that's the proper way to avoid the message being flagged as spam; it's proper use of the DomainKeys standards.

This is a well documented (annoying) feature from Gmail. If interested, just search "gmail on behalf of remove" in Google and you will see the sea of ink that's been written on the issue.

I just checked and I do experience the same thing. It is always there if you look at the headers of any mail client. It is just that Outlook shows the on behalf of, while most clients will only show the 'From' Field, not the sender.

I guess that Gmail has to do this as they are using their own SMTP server to send the email and that server name has to match or be registered to match the domain name on your email address.

As these emails are going through Nuevasyncs servers, I guess I can change my SMTP settings to my personal domain server, but then I think all my 'sent' mail would go into the personal domain 'sent' mail folder. Not the gmail one. And I like having everything in one place, under one account.

Hmm...ok, somehow I thought it'd work like you'd expect.

I hesitate to say this, but a while back we considered providing SMTP sending as part of the service. This got dropped because of a) concerns that we'd become a spam vector, and b) the expectation that users would have usable SMTP servers anyway.

Perhaps we can revisit that decision sometime.

allanweinman wrote:
As these emails are going through Nuevasyncs servers, I guess I can change my SMTP settings to my personal domain server, but then I think all my 'sent' mail would go into the personal domain 'sent' mail folder. Not the gmail one. And I like having everything in one place, under one account.

I believe that we skip the sent folder copy specifically for GMail users because their SMTP makes the copy. I'm not 100% sure how the code is designed, but it may do the right thing if you configure a personal SMTP server (that is, it'll see that you're not sending via GMail, and make a copy in the IMAP sent folder -- the GMail one, that is).

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 16 Jul 2009 04:25 PDT

So I just tried to change my SMTP credentials in your Email configure page.

I kept the IMAP section the same as it is already configure for GMAIL.
Then I changed the SMTP section to my current private mail hosting company.

SMTP username: my private email address: allan (at) weinman.ca
SMTP password: my private email password
SMTP port: my service host says to use 25 or 587
I kept SSL checked.

I tried 587 then 25. Both failed. The email sat in the outbox of the iphone and I received and error that it could not send the email.

The green configuration dot was there on your website for the 587 test, then it said there was a problem for the 25 test. But the funny thing was it took me a while to get it to re-accept my pure gmail credentials. After the 3rd time it finally accepted it and showed the green dot again.

Anyway, I am back to using gmail for for imap and smtp.

Just wanted to make sure I did what you said might work.
I thought at least email would send, just was not sure where the sent mail might go.
I am surprised that it would not accept my SMTP credentials at all. They work from outlook and from the iphone if I configure it directly.

Just to mention that when it was not working and the red dot appeared I did go to the Detailed Status Report PAGE. It said that all was OK except of course teh gmail/imap section at the bottom. But what surprised me was that it did not have a seperate check for SMTP as that is all I changed. I did not change the IMAP settings.

Any idea?

Thanks,
Allan