Some of my colleagues (many of them actually) are using gmail as their email client for professional purpose. It usually works not too bad when using it from gmail (you can use your primary email address to send email for instance with the “reply to” field filled with your primary email) but some people struggle to properly configure their account for external use ( Stéphanie is again one of them…), especially on their smartphone. Some instead of sending email with their primary email adresse, they send it with their gmail account, which is not the expected behavior). In this post, I’ll help them do a good job configuring gmail to manage professional emails (even though, I must warn them that doing so is evil).

Create your professional account in gmail

Go to Settings / Accounts and Import and click on “Add another email address you own”. In the “Email address” field, enter your name and the alternate email address you own (for instance tuxette@my-company.fr). I advise not to choose the “Treat as an alias” option (the differences between the two options is explained on this page). The SMTP server of your company must be used to send the emails from google: enter your SMTP server settings and click on “Add account”. A confirmation code is sent to your primary email address which must be entered in gmail form to confirm that you own this account. This allows you to send emails from your email address tuxette@my-company.fr.

To read Tuxette’s email, click on “Add a POP3 mail account you own” and enter your POP3 settings.

Configure your gmail account on Android or any other email client you want to use

I describe how to configure gmail so that it synchronizes emails from your gmail account (tuxette.gmail@gmail.com for instance) and properly sends email with your primary email account using gmail (tuxette@my-company.fr). I will describe the configuration with the Email app on Android but it is fairly standard and can be used with any other email client (if you do not use the gmail app). I recommand the use of K9-mail which I find very good (especially since it can manage identities), but any other email client can be configured in the way I describe below.

You first need to make two additional steps in gmail settings to use gmail from an external email client:

• First, in Forwarding and POP/IMAP, click on Enable IMAP
• Second, you must turn on access for less secure app at this link

Then, open your email client on your android device and fill the first screen as described here:

• on the first screen, the email address is your primary email address (tuxette@my-company.fr) and your password is your gmail password. Then click on “Manual configuration”
• click on “IMAP account”. The form must be filled as follow: your email address is unchanged (tuxette@my-company.fr), your user name is your gmail user name tuxette.gmail), your password is your gmail password, the IMAP server is imap.gmail.com / SSL / 993, then click on “NEXT”
• the SMTP server can be configured in two different ways: either you use gmail SMTP server (which will probably rely on your company SMTP server) or you can use directly your company SMTP server. To use the first solution, enter the SMTP server setting smtp.gmail.com/SSL/465, your gmail user name and password.

You’re done! Stéphanie, I know that you are aware of how much I like chocolate 😉