Comments on: Petition To Fix Gmail’s Custom From Glitch

By: nick

nick — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:27:50 +0000

Gmail is so buggy Google needs to get on top of it this is frustrating

By: Anna

Anna — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 23:54:41 +0000

mines glited when i try to look a my Mail it quckliy gose back to inbox!

By: db

db — Wed, 06 May 2009 22:32:46 +0000

old thread, but using gmail apps gets around this for anyone still trying

By: Ed

Ed — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 20:52:16 +0000

I thought I would mention a third option that would also work.
Option 1)
Add your IP address to the Gmail SPF record (not really an option)
Option 2)
From name@gmail.com on behalf of [name@mydomain.com]
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.

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 20:32:54 +0000

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:
To: “SPF Test”
From: Me
Sender: Me

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