Setting up Professional Email Addresses in Gmail

Many of our clients use Gmail for their everyday email system. For small to medium size businesses we believe that Gmail is a better choice than using Microsoft Outlook. In fact, we use Gmail as our corporate email system at SlipFire.

Gmail is Fast, Reliable, Accessible from around the world, and you never have to worry about backing up your email. All things that Outlook is not.

Google has made setting up professional email addresses with your own domain name in Gmail very simple. So for instance, if you send an email to info at slipfire dotcom, it will be delivered to our Gmail account. When we reply to your email it, the address will be info at slipfire dotcom. You would never know that we were using Gmail unless we told you.

So here’s how you setup your professional email address:

  1. At your domain host setup emails forwarders for the email addresses you want. For example: We setup info at slipfire dotcom as forwarding to our Gmail email address.
  2. Once that’s done, sign into your Gmail account
  3. Click on SETTINGS in the upper right corner of the screen
  4. Click on the ACCOUNTS tab
  5. Find where it says “When I receive a message sent to one of my addresses:” You will have two choices here and you need to decide which one you want to choose. This is a universal setting for all the email addresses under this account. For most businesses you should choose: “Reply from the same address the message was sent to
  6. Now, click on ADD ANOTHER EMAIL ADDRESS
  7. A Popup box should open
  8. In the NAME field, enter the name you want to appear your emails. Fo rinfo at slipfire dotcom, we have “SlipFire Info”
  9. In the EMAIL ADDRESS field enter your new email address (i.e. info at slipfire dotcom)
  10. The REPLY-TO ADDRESS field is optional. If you want your email coming to one address, but you want your recipients to reply to a different address you would fill this in. Most of the time you would leave this blank.
  11. Click NEXT STEP
  12. Click SEND VERIFICATION

Gmail will now send you a verification email to your new email address, just to make sure it’s yours. Follow the instructions in the email and will have another email address.

You will also notice that when you compose a new email or reply to an existing one, you will be presented with a dropdown box that where you can choose which of your email addresses you want this email to come from.

35 Comments

  1. i tried this but when i send an email from gmail using my professional id, the recipient gets my email with professional email id plus gmail address in parenthesis. Is there anyway to get rid of the google adress?

  2. That shouldn’t happen. You may get “mailed-by gmail.com”, but not the gmail address in parenthesis. Under SETTINGS – ACCOUNTS, click on EDIT INFO next to the email address. Does the gmail address show?

  3. I’m afraid it does happen.

    See what Google says at the bottom their help page: http://tinyurl.com/bjfo9

    ” Note: when you’re sending with a different ‘From:’ address, your Gmail address will still be included in your email header’s sender field, to help prevent your mail from being marked as spam. Most email clients don’t display the sender field, though some versions of Microsoft Outlook may display “From yourusername@gmail.com on behalf of customaddress@mydomain.com.” ”

    A disturbing amount of people don’t know about this until they learn about it the hard way, myself included.

    You may also want to check the google groups discussion on the topic: http://tinyurl.com/48khdm

  4. I’ve taken this a step further using Google Apps. I have set up email addresses at several different domains. When I log into myaddress@mydomain.com, the user interface is indistinguishable from the Gmail interface, and I have access to all the Google add-ons, like Calendar and Docs.

    All my accounts forward to one main account, and I use the forwarding and sending features as described by SlipFire.

  5. Sarthak, thanks for the comment. Google apps is definitely a great alternative and highly redcommended. Setting up different email addresses in basic Gmail is just so easy I usually recommend that first.

  6. Sarthak – I followed the slipfire recommendations and it works great however, the only test that had a professional header without the gmail association appearing was yahoo. I tested it with many accounts through friends, both personal and business. So I went to apps as per your suggestion and would appreciate instructions on how to link email ID with google apps I followed the link but it doesn’t seem to be clear cut. Tks

  7. Setting email up with google apps is a bit different. With apps you already have the domain setup (mydomain.com)… you just need to add the email name (ie Sarthak), to make Sarthak@mydomain.com.

    From the apps dashsboard, click on “Activate Email” and follow the directions.

    You may need to change the MX record on at your domain registrar.

  8. I already have set up all my alternate email addresses @mydomain.com, which all forward to the gmail account. The full header still indicates the sender as me@gmail.com

    As far as I can tell, the only way to avoid this is to either use the email server provided by the domain host or to pay for a different email server. I had been seeking an interface that allowed me to use RTF and include images and/or formatting in the signatures, as well as associating different signatures with different alias’ – I thought I’d found that in gmail, but I do not want everyone I email to be able to identify or send email directly to the base account.

    1. HI Ellen, have you solved this problem..currently i have all my email addresses which are sent from the one maain account, showing as sent via that account. Does your work around of using a different outgoing server for gmail apps work. do you have any other tips to make this work I would appreciate your advice…

  9. Very useful thread. I’ve set up to domains with several email address under each with google apps and it works very well. If your managing your email in the web browser you tell google apps to “Reply from the same address the message was sent to” which is great. I also want to use Outlook 2007 and IMAP the google apps account – I’ve successfully done this, and again, everything works great….Just one problem: How do I get Outlook 2007 to “Reply from the same address the message was sent to” – it will only reply from the primary google app address. Any ideas?

  10. Hey NJT,

    Glad you got Google Apps working well. As for Outlook, I’m not sure how to set that up. However, our recommendation is too get rid of Outlook! 😉

  11. Im not much of a fan of outlook either, but it’s a lot more user friendly and intuitive than google web based mail client. Google apps is great, buy if it’s functionality evaporates when used with an email client it’s not much use. Anyone any suggestions for an email client that can handle google apps but comes with the business functionality of outlook 2007?

  12. Tried it but it appears to basic, I need to be able to line up custom user forms and attachments for various common notifications.

  13. Hi nice post, i read your blog from time to time but i was wondering something. I also run a blog on a similar topic, but i get 1,000’s of spam comments and emails every day does that happen to you.. Any ideas to stop it? I currently have commenting disabled but i want to turn it back on.. Thanks!

  14. This is exactly what I was looking for for one of our clients. He did not want to use Outlook and wanted us to set up his email @mydomain.com through hotmail. This is the next best thing. Thank you!

  15. Is there a way to consolidate several email accounts on gmail into 1, including several @mydomain accounts? I have a client who owns several domains and would like to have a centralized email system through which he can check all his @mydomain emails, but through a cloud service like gmail and hotmail.

    Thanks for the tips in the article, very useful!

  16. Hi Steve, informative post about professional email address integration into one’s gmail account. Didn’t know this. Came across your blog post by looking for prices that people charge for professional email address services, as thinking of adding it to the services we offer.
    ps, I would have recommended Akismet to Cruz too, in your comments, or I may have just ignored the comment I’ve had a few very similar comments on my own WordPress blogs and thought they looked like spam comments themselves. One or two of your other comments also look like some I’ve also received on my blogs. I usually ignore them. If Cruz was genuine, then yes, Akismet was a good recommendation.

    1. That’s great news! But you may want to try Google Apps for your Domain. I think that’s a much better way to go.

    1. I would recommend you to use johndoe@yahoo.com. Without dots; many business companies use dots between names but it looks too large.

      It’s better to have a simple and compact address email, easy to remember. Thus there are some email providers that have problems with dots.

  17. yes i am also agree with the javier post many people add dots after the name to add company name but looks to messy. An email id must easy to remember and must sounds like professionals. Nowadays it becomes one of the vital identity of person.

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