Gmail – How to you change how your Gmail account name appears

Being an avid user of Gmail and Google Apps myself, I know that it's not as simple as it seems, there's a few steps involved.

You have to redirect all of your work emails to your personal one, verify that you own your personal email, verify (again) that you own your work email so you can send mail through that address and setup a filter so that things don't go into super confusion mode. Long!

Thankfully for you, I'll tell you exactly how you can acomplish this! I'm so nice.

Follow these steps:

1. Login to your work email account

2. Go to Settings on the top-right corner of your screen and select Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> Add a forwarding address

3. Enter your personal email, along with a tag, such as: username+business@gmail.com where business would be the tag that you associate your work emails to (although this can be anything, make it easy to tell what it is)

4. Login to your personal Gmail account

5. Go to Settings -> Filters -> Create a new filter

6. In the To: field, put the address you chose for forwarding your business mail to (in my example, username+business@gmail.com and, on the next step, choose to apply a new label (called Business for example)

7. Still in Settings, go to the Accounts tab and Add another email address you own

8. Put in your business email (lets say username@company.com and also specify the same address as the reply-to address and you can choose to use either SMTP server (I usually don't bother)

9. Accept both authorizations sent to either emails and you're done!

When mail arrives at your work box, it will be redirected to your personal box but with whatever label you chose (in the example, Business). Makes it much simpler to organize your mail in a way that won't consume your time searching for it.

Hope this helps!

Perhaps Gmail doesn't let you search the email headers from their web interface, but you should be able to access all email messages via POP/IMAP, and then you can use standard search tools (e.g. grep) to search for anything you want.

However, see the comment above from Ramhound and myself—the email headers might lead you back to Gmail itself, which won't reveal much about the originator of the email. Also, all headers are easy to forge anyway. If the user is clever enough, they can generate whichever headers / source IPs they want.

If in your case the user you're trying to spy on / trace isn't malicious, then you might be able to get at least some information other than the message content from email headers.