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Comment by pud | Hacker News Reader

Not exactly.

To send from a different 'From' in Mail.app, first you need to connect your iPhone to additional email accounts (Settings->Mail). Then these addresses will show up in your 'From' drop down.

But then you end up with multiple inboxes in your Mail.app. Which is messy, fills up storage, and hurts my brain -- since I never need to check my other inboxes (because all my email addresses forward to the same Gmail account).

With the Gmail iPhone app, I just need to prove once (in gmail.com) that I have access to whatever 'From' addresss I want. Then I can select them in the Gmail app.

Note: I admit that the viewport issues discussed in the blog post are indeed an annoyance that I hope Google fixes soon. But I prefer Gmail app to Mail.app nonetheless.

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To send from different mail addresses in Mail.app for iOS with only one inbox, you can add your additional mail addresses to your default mail address in the mail configuration by separating them with commas:

default@example.com, additional1@example.com, additional2@example.com, etc.

The same trick works for the OS X version of Mail.app

Thanks! I upvoted you because this was really good news for me.

On the iPhone (but not the iPad) I think you have to write this somewhere else and paste it in because I can't find a comma on the keyboard when editing that text field!

You are right, I have never actually entered my additional mail addresses into that text field but prepared the string in a text editor and copied it afterwards.

Unfortunately this does not work for accounts of the type "GMail", as far as I can see. (Maybe you could configure your gmail account as an IMAP account, but then you lose a few gmail-specific features)

That is correct; if I use the 'Google Mail' setup and add an additional mail address, the IMAP login no longer works since the mail addresses as a whole are taken as username. In the default IMAP setup, sender mail addresses and the user name are separated.

Are there any other Gmail-specific features except for 'Archive'?

My main annoyance with Gmail and local mail clients – including Mail.app for iOS and OS X – is that those clients show mails at least twice due to Gmail's label structure if you enable all labels. I am therefore glad that the new Gmail app for iOS is much more usable. On the Mac, I use Mailplane and Mail.app only for backup and offline usage purposes.

It seems like "GMAIL"-account types have real push? Or at least I'm seemingly getting new mail much quicker than I ever used to get on IMAP?

Plus it integrates much more smoothly into the calendar app as well. Better than fiddling around with webcal links and the very well hidden multi-calendar selector at https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect )

Never had a problem with duplicate mails, in fact I'm having a problem with de-duplicated mails (When I send a mail to a mailinglist, I never receive a copy back that ensures proper list delivery, because it gets de-duplicated to the copy in Sent mail)

Nice little tip. Thanks

Unfortunately this only works for multiple addresses with the same SMTP account on the same server. All mails you send will be from that account (check the MAIL-FROM field in the SMTP session). If you have separate personal/work accounts, you are stuck.

Gmail allows you to access external STMP servers with dedicated accounts. This allows you to basically use Gmail as a client to your corporate mail server. I've been using Gmail to consolidate all my mail accounts in different servers. It's really nice.

Oh, and threading “just works” in Gmail.

This hasn't worked in the Android Gmail app for several years now. The option is there, but no matter what I select when replying to an email it will ALWAYS send it from the address it was sent to.

So let's say I have 2 email address, me@gmail.com and me@mydomain.com. My gmail account is setup so I can send from either one. If I get an email sent to me@mydomain.com and I change the From address to me@gmail.com in my reply, it always sends it from me@mydomain.com anyway. It doesn't matter what I select for the from address. This doesn't happen in the normal gmail web interface, it's only the Android app.

The thing is that this used to work a few years ago (Android 2.2 or very early in 2.3). It was broke in an update at some point and still hasn't been fixed. I've tried reporting the bug, and even had a Google employee verify he has the same problem, but it's unfortunately still there. I've verified it with other people, and it's happened on the past 3 Android phones I've had, so it seems to be a universal problem.

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