Gmail Forwarding – Make Emailing an Address That Forwards Back to Me Appear in the Inbox

When you set up Gmail to send mail as your other account, there are two choices:

• Use Gmail's SMTP server
• Use another SMTP server

If you choose the latter option, it should use your real mail server to send the email message. This should produce the same exact email message as if you logged in to your other email host and sent a message from there.

For information on how to use a different SMTP server, see Google's help document. Find the part that says If you choose to send mail through another domain's SMTP servers.

Google says that this is one of the reasons to use your own SMTP server:

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." For this reason, if you don't want 'on behalf of' to appear in any of your messages, we recommend using the SMTP servers of your other email provider.

Based on my addition to the initial question, I feel like the answer is no (sort of).

The emails in question were skipping the inbox due to a "hidden" filter in the import settings for that address. This filter was not visible in the Filters section of the settings, and it was not applying a label, so there was no "easy" way to track down what was causing the problem.

The easiest way to track down what filters get applied is simply to make sure that every single filter (even these "hidden" ones) applies a label. That way, the label will quickly tell you what filter gets applied.

That's an easy solution for filters created under settings, but not quite so easy for the filters tucked inside Gmails import settings for other addresses.