Red Herring reported that Google is Offering Productivity Apps. I know for a fact that this is not new since I have been using “GMail for your domain” on one of my domain for some time now. The new addition to the suite is Page Creator.
Google Apps for Your Domain is what is known as hosted applications. Hosted application is a new trend that is gaining attention and acceptance in the software arena.
Besides free and opensource softwares that you can download run on your own computers, free hosted applications is also another source of softwares that small business can turn to.
Free web email is probably the most common hosted application - GMail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, 163, Sina.
I personally find GMail has an edge over the rest for the business user as it can send email as another address.
Using this feature you can send email as if it comes from your company’s domain.
Not only that, if you have a few emails from different domains, you can manage all of them in a single GMail account.
Google Apps for Your Domain goes one step further to make the service customizable with your branding and color scheme.
This service is in beta and could become a paid service but “Organizations accepted by Google during the Google Apps for Your Domain beta period are eligible for free service for their approved beta users even beyond the end of the beta period, as described in the Terms of Service.”
But before you run to sign up, check out the privacy notice. Om Malik of GigaOM is apparently concerned about the privacy disclosure.
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“personally find GMail has an edge over the rest for the business user as it can send email as another address.”
… However, it does not really send email as another address. Rather than REALLY changing the From: address, the actual From: header says “From: yourname@gmail.com on behalf of youraddress@yourdomain.com” … and if it’s not bad enough showing your actual GMail address, Outlook doesn’t even process the On behalf of, and those users end up writing back to/storing your GMail address.
I’m aware of this and agree with you that it actually doesn’t work well with Outlook users.
But this is problem (or feature, depending on who you talk to) and is much more complicated than that.
It is not an issue of just changing the From:
It got to do with the email protocol (RFC). And without pretending I know alot about it, I believe GMail is following the book.
It is also has a security angle.
Contrary to your observation, Outlook, no Gmail, is the one that cause it to display “on behalf of”.
I do not know what the Outlook team thinks but I like to predict that they will tell you that it is for your good that they are alerting the you that the email is not coming from the address you are expecting. So can you fault them?
To me, yes it is an issue, but I’m not trying to hide behind a false email, so I’m not worry that my customers sees it. I just use a code for my email and tell them (if they ask) I’m using it to read all my mails.