Gmail – Send Gmail and Google Apps outbound emails through respective account servers

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!

If you are not already using SPF and DKIM to authenticate your email, these can help it get past some spam filters.

SPF identifies the servers that are authorized to send mail from your domain. If all mail sent from the domain is sent through Google Apps, see this page for instructions on creating an SPF record.

DKIM is used to add a digital signature to your message headers so that the recipient's mail system can verify its authenticity. See this page for instructions on enabling DKIM in Google Apps.

Neither of these guarantees that your messages will not be marked as spam, but they should help, assuming that your domain does not have a reputation for sending spam. (If users frequently report mail from your domain as spam then authenticating the message as being from your domain could actually hurt.)