A while ago I decided to purchase an iPod Touch, which to all intents and purpose is an iPhone without being able to phone, text etc. It has been great, in fact so great that I will at some point in the future be getting an iPhone. I also use Gmail for all my mail coming into one account. Finally I have managed to set up the iPod to send mail from accounts other than my Gmail account.
Gmail is truely wonderful and I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for an email solution, whether that be a business or an individual. In fact we recommend it to all our customers. I have one Gmail account which I receive mail into. The thing that differs slightly here is that I have mail from more than one account. I have got addresses for Equal Design as well as personal emails and I would rather have mail appear to come from these account than my Gmail account. Therefore I have set up forwarders that just forward mail from my @equaldesign domain to my Gmail. Then there is a handy tool in Gmail that allows you to send mail from other accounts, which allows me to send and receive all mail from Gmail and it comes from and goes to my @equaldesign account.
My problem was that although the iPod Touch has a simple interface for setting up a Gmail account what it doesn’t allow you to do is to send mail from other accounts that you have set up in your Gmail interface. Well this is no longer a problem thanks to the following solution that allows you to send mail from any email account from your Gmail account on your iPhone or iPod touch.
- From the home screen click on settings and then select Mail, Contacts and Calenders.
- Add a new mail account and select other as the account type
- In the address option add the address that you want to send mail from and type a random string in the password box (anything will do!)
- Now tap save and go to the POP tab
- Enter ‘g’ under the hostname and username for incoming mail server and enter ‘smtp.gmail.com’ under outgoing mail server
- Enter your Gmail username and password under the Outgoing mailserver settings
- Tap save and then select ‘No’ to the pop up message
- Tap save and then save again
- Under accounts select the mail account that you have just created and delete all the text in the fields under incoming mail server
- Press the home button and you are done, but make sure that the newly created account is sent to receive mail manually rather than at regular intervals.
That’s it! When sending emails from your iPhone you should now be able send mail from other account by tapping on the CC/BCC/from box and choosing the account. This will also appear in your sent items under your Gmail account and all replies will go to that account.
July 21, 2009
Hey Mark, thanks for the awesome solution! First one I’ve found that actually works… i do have a problem though. did you get it to work with multiple ‘send as’ accounts for your gamil account? if i add one as described above it works fine, but when i try to add another one, the first one disappears… did you encounter the same problem?
thanks
ben
July 21, 2009
Ben,
I have wanted something that does just that on the iPhone and also with Apple Mail. To allow gmail users to access their account through the iPhone or Apple Mail and then send mail from other accounts like you can through the gmail web interface. Unfortunately apart from what is outlined above I am yet to find a solution. Let me know if you find one!
August 7, 2009
Mark,
I have tried this. But when I try to send with the added account, I get this error:
Cannot Send Mail
The connection to the outgoing server smtp@gmail.com failed.
Any ideas
August 11, 2009
Thanks Mark! Works great.
Ronaldo, to get it to work for me I had to go back in to the account setup after all of Mark’s steps and turn SSL on for gmail smpt server.
October 21, 2009
worked perfectly, thanks SOO much Mark
December 14, 2009
Thanks for the tip! This works perfectly.
January 15, 2010
Hi Mark,
Thanks very much for this! It works great. One more thing though; is it possible to change the standard email address in the CC/BCC/from box? Now the gmail address is selected automatically while i prefer to use my other address.
Best, Rob
February 14, 2010
I’d been looking everywhere for this fix. Brilliant.
March 19, 2010
This is kind of a hack around, and although it works … it’s not the best way to do it. Why create a new connection for each account you want to send as, when you just need to know what field to fill out. Check out the info on my site for the details:
http://vertigion.com/iPhoneSendAs
Hope this helps you all out! I spent HOURS (spread across several weeks) trolling the internet looking for a good solution and pieced things together and found a good answer to this problem.
Thanks for your fix though. It got me by in the meantime.
March 26, 2010
This is terrific, thanks!