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Separate FROM addresses in Outlook

How Outlook manages different FROM addresses.

John L has done a great job merging all his email accounts into a single Gmail storage but still has a problem:

A puzzling Outlook-Gmail question:

With the newly added SMTP functionality to Gmail, I can now use the Gmail website to consolidate all my accounts, so now I can SEND directly from any of my other POP accounts, and the email appears to come from them without “on behalf of googlemail”. Which is great. I also collect all my other POP mail in my Gmail Imap. I have subfolders (labels) for mail from each POP account, within Gmail.

However, when I get back home and use Outlook with Gmail, as opposed to the Gmail website, the situation is a little harder. When I type ‘reply’ to any mail in my Gmail Imap subfolders, i can only get it to send using the default Gmail address, unless I choose to send through one of my other POP addresses from the accounts dropdown list. This is annoying. Is there any way for Outlook to detect (in the same way as gmail website does) which account to reply with?

Sounds like you’ve done a great job making the best use of Gmail to combine your email addresses into a single mailbox while keeping the FROM email addresses separate.

Gmail can set the FROM address for a reply to match the address to which the original message was sent. For example an email sent to [email protected], when Fred hits reply the response is automatically created as From [email protected] .

Outlook can do the same thing if you use Outlook to bring in the messages from each of your email accounts.

However Outlook uses the account setting (ie which service you got the message from) to determine the reply FROM address.

In your case Outlook considers there’s only one reply address because it can only see the Gmail account service setup in Outlook. Outlook doesn’t know that the Gmail account is actually a combination of many email sources.

Unless there’s a third-party tool out there we don’t know of any way to handle this automatically within Outlook.

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