me@email.address On Behalf Of Scott Young
Anyone who's ever experimented with Gmail's 'Send Mail As' feature has probably worked out that there is a problem with this feature when sending mail to Outlook (not Express) users.
Most email clients will display the From header as whatever Gmail says it is (ie. the address you're trying to "send mail as"). However, Outlook displays it as "you@gmail.com On Behalf Of [chosen From header]". It's pretty annoying if you're using a personal Gmail address to send work email, which is probably the most common use of the Send Mail As feature -- lots of work email systems are impossible, difficult or inconvenient to log in to remotely (particularly when you have to use Outlook Web Access, which doesn't seem to support displaying the Send button on any browser but Internet Explorer).
I think there's a relatively simple partial solution to this problem, however. At present, Gmail passes the user's 'real' email address in the Sender header like so (I may be wrong here, taking this from memory):
Sender: you@gmail.com
Outlook displays this as you@gmail.com .
If Gmail was to send the header like this instead:
Sender: Your Name
then I'd imagine that Outlook would display Your Name on behalf of Your Name. Sure, this isn't a very good solution, but at least it doesn't make your real email address blatantly obvious to the receiver. Of course, we don't want to conceal the real email address completely - that would just open the system to abuse. But it would be nice if the real email address was only visible when the receiver was specifically looking for it. Headers can be forged anyway, so I don't think it's necessary to draw attention to the fact that the mail wasn't really sent from the email address in the From header.
Microsoft have a tutorial up on how to send mail on behalf of others. I think this should be implemented differently to Gmail's "Send Mail As".
Also, for those of you who use the British English version of Gmail (or any other Google service): I'd recommend against it. US English always gets the newest features first, and there's often a wait of a month or so before the "other languages" (which includes British English) support those features. I spent a long time lamenting the fact that I didn't have chat in my Gmail page before I worked this one out.
Most email clients will display the From header as whatever Gmail says it is (ie. the address you're trying to "send mail as"). However, Outlook displays it as "you@gmail.com On Behalf Of [chosen From header]". It's pretty annoying if you're using a personal Gmail address to send work email, which is probably the most common use of the Send Mail As feature -- lots of work email systems are impossible, difficult or inconvenient to log in to remotely (particularly when you have to use Outlook Web Access, which doesn't seem to support displaying the Send button on any browser but Internet Explorer).
I think there's a relatively simple partial solution to this problem, however. At present, Gmail passes the user's 'real' email address in the Sender header like so (I may be wrong here, taking this from memory):
Sender: you@gmail.com
Outlook displays this as you@gmail.com .
If Gmail was to send the header like this instead:
Sender: Your Name
then I'd imagine that Outlook would display Your Name on behalf of Your Name. Sure, this isn't a very good solution, but at least it doesn't make your real email address blatantly obvious to the receiver. Of course, we don't want to conceal the real email address completely - that would just open the system to abuse. But it would be nice if the real email address was only visible when the receiver was specifically looking for it. Headers can be forged anyway, so I don't think it's necessary to draw attention to the fact that the mail wasn't really sent from the email address in the From header.
Microsoft have a tutorial up on how to send mail on behalf of others. I think this should be implemented differently to Gmail's "Send Mail As".
Also, for those of you who use the British English version of Gmail (or any other Google service): I'd recommend against it. US English always gets the newest features first, and there's often a wait of a month or so before the "other languages" (which includes British English) support those features. I spent a long time lamenting the fact that I didn't have chat in my Gmail page before I worked this one out.