using Gmail as your primary email client

While this is, in no way, endorsed by my employer - I've been using Gmail as my primary email client for some time now because it works well for me.  Using email rules or specified delivery addresses on various email servers for work, I redirect all of my @unl.edu and @notes.unl.edu to Gmail (that's also where I redirect all of my personal mail like @me.com).  It's a great system that, recently, got even better.

By going to "Settings" and "Accounts and Import" in Gmail, you have always been able to add any external email accounts - that Gmail can then send from; but the drawback was that Gmail has always done strange things with email headers - sending messages "on behalf of" your external corporate address, from your personal @gmail address.  Generally not a huge deal because most people never notice... anything but the content of a message - but for those people who happen to notice & aren't sure what's going on, it can be really disturbing.  I've also seen it cause problems with loops in mailing lists, or making me more likely for my messages to get automatically filtered out as junk mail.

When Google first (finally) released the functionality to use your local (in my case, smtp.unl.edu) email-out server, I could not get it to work.  After dinking with it for a long time, I've finally found some settings to make it work and I figured I should try to save others a little frustration.

I'm still not sure what's being blocked or where things are failing, but I've found that if I use my full "jdoe3@unl.edu" email address (Google seems to really depend on using a full email address as a username for most of their services) and My.UNL password, turn off SSL encryption, and specify port number 25 (see the attached graphic), it will work.  I've found it to work with my @mac.com and other email systems that I couldn't get to work before, too.

Now I don't have the problem with weird headers, or exposing my personal email address on business messages.  Everything now looks like it is a normal, legitimate email message, sent from the correct host: @unl.edu (which is exactly the case).