You’ve probably accumulated several different e-mail addresses over your years online. You might have an address for work, an address for your personal life, an address you got when you were in college—and perhaps a few more that you’ve forgotten about, too. It can be quite a chore to check each of these inboxes separately, which is why most e-mail gurus suggest using a universal inbox—a single address that collects messages from each of your various online profiles. This way, you get all your e-mail in one place.
Google’s Gmail has long offered some of the best tools for setting up such a system (see this page for how to do so). Unfortunately, Gmail’s universal inbox has long been troubled by a flaw that, for some users, is a deal-breaker. The problems is, when you try to send outbound mail from your Gmail universal inbox, Gmail adds a tag telling your recipients that you’re actually using Gmail and not your office e-mail. If your recipient is using Microsoft Outlook, he’ll see a message like, “From youroffice@domain.com on behalf of yourgmail@gmail.com.” This can look unprofessional—say you work at The New York Times and you’re contacting a bigwig to set up an interview. If the bigwig sees that you’re not actually using a Times address, he might dismiss your request. (Something like this has actually happened to me before.)
Gmail’s biggest fans have long been demanding that Google drop the “on behalf of” tag. Google explains that it adds the tag in order to prevent your e-mail from being considered spam by your recipient; the theory is that if the e-mail is honest about its origins, it shouldn’t arouse suspicion by spam checking software. Recently though, some users noticed that the tag had suddenly disappeared—now when you use Gmail to reply to a message that had originally come in to your office address, there’s nothing to alert your recipient that you’re using Gmail. Gmailers rejoiced—Google had finally made Gmail the perfect universal inbox!
But the joy didn’t last long. On a help forum, a Google representative explained that the “on behalf of” tag’s disappearance was actually due to a bug in a recent Gmail update. Soon, the rep explained, engineers would fix the bug and “on behalf of” would return—at least for a short while, until Google found a permanent way to both remove the tag and make sure your messages aren’t flagged by spam-checking software.
So for now, then, you can write messages from Gmail without your recipients getting wise. But soon, your universal inbox will tell where your mail is really coming from—and the dream of a flawless universal inbox will have to wait a little longer.
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