When Lifehacker reported that Google has finally removed the annoying “on behalf of” behaviour from Gmail, it did sound too good to be true. But since Google had already informed that a solution was on the way to rectify this annoying problem, we thought that finally Gmail could be truly used as a consolidated inbox. Alas, a couple of day later, Google Guide Sarah brought all Gmail users back to earth by clarifying that the recent removal of sent “on behalf of” was only a bug which will soon return to haunt all Gmail users and that the “solution” is still some time away.
For those who are not aware of the issue, just a recap. Gmail can theoretically be used to consolidate multiple email addresses so that you can receive all your emails in various inboxes in Gmail and also send an email from any of your other email address from within the Gmail interface. It’s a great feature in theory, but it has one annoying and frustrating flaw. The emails sent from the other email addresses are sent with a ‘From’ field that looks something like: “From yourusername@gmail.com on behalf of customaddress@mydomain.com” if the email is read by the recipient using Microsoft Outlook or Windows Live Mail.
Recently Google had promised to solve this issue after many users complained through this thread. However, Google declined to give any timeline for rectifying this problem. So when many users started observing the disappearance of “on behalf of”, it was felt that Google has finally issued a bug fix to resolve the issue. But Google’s clarification that this solution was a bug by itself and not the proposed bug fix has highly disappointed users. Google intends to resolve this by offering users an option to use their domain’s SMTP server from within the Gmail interface.
Google claims that this tagline is being used to help prevent your email from being flagged as spam by your recipients’ email services which support DomainKeys. However, Yahoo mail, which otherwise is less innovative than Gmail, does allow sending emails from your alternate email addresses without the “on behalf of” annoyance, and such mails are not marked as spam by their recipients’ mailboxes!
If you are a Google Apps for your Domain (GAFYD) user who is struggling with another flaw of Google whereby your Google Apps account is different from a regular Google account, then this upcoming bug fix could solve your woes. If you are using Google Apps only for your individual email on your personal domain, you can then simply use Google Apps to forward your domain email to your regular Gmail account and then reply from your regular Gmail interface using your domain’s email address. This would allow you to access Google services such as Reader and Picasa which are not currently offered on a Google Apps Account, through a single Google account and allow you to streamline your Google Talk usage by only using your regular Gmail account instead of multiple Gmail and Google Apps accounts.
So Google, on behalf of all the Gmail users, we sincerely request you to rectify this problem as soon as possible.
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