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Petition To Fix Gmail's Custom From Glitch
Earlier, I wrote about Gmail's bogus "Custom From" system that doesn't hide your Gmail address even if you tell Gmail you want another email address to show. I got an email from someone similarly irked by it, telling me that there's now a petition to ask Google to fix this. Would I sign? Sure. I'm now signatory number two. If you want to push the numbers up into the double digits, here's the petition. By Danny Sullivan on Feb. 24, 2006 | Permalink See related posts in: Email
Next Post: Synchronizing RSS Bandit On My Desktop With My Laptop Comments Comment by Richard | October 5, 2006 1:32 PM I thought I would mention a third option that would also work. Option 1) Option 2) Option 3) Gmail could implement a new feature to allow me to send email using my SMTP server instead of theirs. Why not? MS Outlook and Thunderbird have options to choose the SMTP server of your choice. There is no reason that Gmail could not also let you send email using the SMTP server of your choice. Gmail already lets me connect to the POP server of my choice. Why not let me also connect to the SMTP server of my choice? By allowing users to pick their own POP and SMTP servers Gmail will have built a webtop replacement for the desktop email client. Comment by Ed | March 9, 2007 1:52 PM Want to comment? If you are signed into TypeKey, you'll see a form below. No form? Click on the sign-in link below, and you can sign-in or sign-up for a free account. Sorry you have to use TypeKey, but I use it to avoid comment spam. All comments currently appear automatically after posting.
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I believe this is down to SPF (http://libspf.org/files/rfc4408.txt). This is an anti spam technology to prevent people sending spoof emails. Basically if your receiving SMTP server is SPF compliant, it will check that the IP address of the sending server against the SPF record in the DNS file for the Host domain specified in the MAIL FROM and (optionally) HELO fields . Thus GMail can only send email purporting to be from GMail.
There are two ways to circumvent this. The first is to add the IP addresses of your SMTP server to GMail's SPF record. The second is to add a Sender header to your email; this is what GMail does. It is up to the email client (Outlook etc) how it interprets and displays the From and Sender fields.
If you send an email to check-auth@verifier.port25.com you will find that while the email you send has the following headers,
Return-Path: <username@gmail.com>
To: "SPF Test" <check-auth@verifier.port25.com>
From: Me <Me@MyDomain.com>
Sender: Me <username@gmail.com>
the GMail server's envelope has the following data:
HELO hostname: nf-out-0910.google.com
Source IP: 64.233.182.187
mail-from: username@gmail.com
so the receiving Mail server is going to lookup the SPF record at gmail.com and check that 64.233.182.187 is valid for that domain. It may also check the hostname.
Now if GMail sent the Mail-from as Me@MyDomain.com and I added GMail's IP addresses to my SPF record by adding mx:gmail.com, then I could hide GMail from everybody, but that requires me to have access to my SPF record, be tech savvy and creates support headaches for GMail.
FYI, it looks to me as though you do not have full access to your DNS record as Tiger Technologies has set up the SPF record as "v=spf1 ip4:64.71.157.128/27 ip4:64.62.142.80/28 ip4:64.62.209.0/24 a ptr ?all" which covers all their servers.
Richard