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Comment by dpark | Hacker News Reader

You’ll find that if you do this, you start getting emails directly to your gmail anyway. I never give out my gmail address, but I use gmail and they happily report my gmail address when they send email as my “real” account. (Both email addresses are included in emails I send.) And upstream they are happy to respond to that gmail account when people hit the reply button.

So I have tons of people who would essentially seem my contact as a black hole if I abandoned my gmail address at this point, because Google seems to have deliberately crafted their clients to prefer the gmail address rather than the “real” address. Essentially treating the gmail address as if it’s a reply-to.

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It's because of Google's use of 'From' and 'Sender' headers in gmail. If you setup an SMTP server to send your emails from for your @example.com address then Google won't mess around and the emails appear to actually come from the email address you want out there, not your @gmail.com.

Or just pay Fastmail $30 a year for such an important 21st century utility such that e-mail is.

I don't use gmail for anything else except throwaway accounts. Who wants to run an SMTP server.

Crazy how many people don’t view email as a critical part of life infrastructure worth paying for.

You can actually set up gmail to send through an external server? I had no idea they’d support that. Running an SMTP server is absolutely not something I’m willing to do, though. Aside from the general setup/maintenance hassle, all the big companies are aggressive at blocking spam and private SMTP servers are just tough to keep unblocked these days (or so I read).

If you have GSuite you can, but I doubt it is possible for individual accounts. [1,2]

You can however send email to google's SMTP server, using an ordinary gmail account [3]. This is how email clients (Eudora, Apple Mail, sendmail) work. The only trick is that they force it to be authenticated and encrypted.

I believe (but have not verified recently) that if you send an email with an email address/domain other than of the authorising account, it will be delivered, even lacking all SPF etc. But, it will block for anything above small quantities of mail, and unless you set up DMARC for your domain, it will still get dropped or marked as spam. [4]

Running an SMTP server for yourself is actually fairly simple (okay, assuming a deep background in linux, but very educational). The real drama is DNS/DMARC/SPF/DKIM and users ruining your reputation.

[1] https://www.datto.com/resource-downloads/SettingUpExternalMa... [2] https://support.google.com/a/answer/178333?hl=en [3] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-... [4] https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/free-smtp-server/

Last time I tried this they forcibly rewrite the sender as your gmail account.

It is, I do -- inbound email forwarded to gmail, outbound from gmail goes out through my server and while it's obvious it's from gmail, it doesn't actually include my gmail address anywhere.

Sending from Google's servers using my address would cause SPF and DMARC failures, so if you want to do that then they'd have to make sure it's clear that the mail is actually from gmail.

This happens because you use Google's own SMTP. If you configure an external SMTP (e.g. Amazon SES) then the gmail webapp won't tell your gmail address to third parties.

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