GMail – fatal flaw & workaround
GMail is an amazingly versatile application. You get loads of space, POP access, even POP downloads from other accounts, extremely accurate spam filtering, forwarding, the ability to send email from other addresses. All for nothing (assuming the ‘do no evil’ mantra doesn’t change and your privacy is protected).
Since 2001, I have always used email addresses of domains I own, so I particularly like the fact you can send from different addresses.
There is however a catch. Google puts your gmail address in every email it sends, regardless of who the “From” is set to. Unfortunately this isn’t just in an obscure anti-spam header (which would I guess be fair enough, even though it does leak the address which spammers could harvest), but as the “Sender: ” header. This has been raised by others too, and I did put a suggestion in Gmail’s suggestion box (to change the header)
This is bad for two reasons: Outlook handles this header very badly. People replying to your emails get a big “On Behalf Of” added to original From line. Ignoring this issue (and arguably Outlook is crap – so why do we care?), it will actually make the gmail address get added to people’s address books, in particular the address books of GMail users!
Perhaps – there is no problem with this. Even if you dumped google – they allow you to forward all emails to whatever account you like, so it’s not like you would be left high and dry. What I don’t like is the fact that it kinda makes the whole point of adding an “Account” to google and sending email from a different address in the first place (a feature I like), a bit pointless.
What I have found is that gradually I started getting more and more emails addressed to my GMail address, one that I have never actually used directly. This annoys me somewhat, perhaps it is just techy pride, wanting to have a custom email address, either way it just does.
There is however a solution, assuming you own the domain of your email address. GMail offers a domain apps service which allows you to have GMail accounts under a different domain. You can modify your MX records to point to GMail’s servers, and create up to 100 accounts (and unlimited aliases through the “mailing lists” feature). This is actually useful even if you want to keep your GMail account, as by setting up an alias, you can have your email delivered direct to Google (pretty reliable) instead of your ISP/host (less reliable).
By using GMail’s own “Get mail from other accounts” feature, you can also transfer all emails in an existing GMail account to another. Google Apps accounts are exactly the same as regular GMail accounts, except their size is 2GB (not growing). I can live with that, having only used 44MB in half a year, and you can always create another account to store attachments / whatever. So now I have transferred accounts. The new one still leaks my main email address if I send from a different account, but at least I have the techy pride that it leaks *my* address :)
