Gmail – Using Gmail to send email from another address without setting the SPF record

dnsdomaingmailsmtp

I would like to use Gmail to send email from another email address such as john@mydomain.com so that the email sender will appear as john@mydomain.com when people receive my emails.

I found the following intructions for achieving this:

Send mail from a different address or alias

But there is one thing that I don't understand, it does not mention anything about setting up the SPF(Sender Policy Framework) record. If I don't change the SPF record to explicitly allow google email servers to send emails on behalf of mydomain.com, will it still work and is this reliable? And why doesn't google mention about this?

Best Answer

The documentation at the link that you provided says:

Your other email provider has to provide authenticated SMTP support for you to use this option. We'll use TLS by default, or SSL if you enable it. Many email services that provide POP or IMAP support also offer authenticated SMTP support, and you can likely find your SMTP server configuration instructions alongside information about POP or IMAP.

It seems that when sending an email from the alternate address gmail uses the third party provider's SMTP server, which would be listed as an authorised sender in the SPF record.

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