If you’ve taken advantage of bringing other email accounts into your Outlook.com account (or live or hotmail in the past), then you’ve probably had that ‘gotcha’ moment when you saw that there was an ‘on behalf of’ notification that showed both the email address you wanted to show up as well as the email address it was actually coming from and that you did not want shown. See the example below where I was sending a message from a cox account that I had imported into my Gmail account, but it revealed my Gmail address too.
This can be just an annoyance or a real problem if you’re trying to manage business and personal email from one provider, be it Gmail or Outlook.com mail. You’d prefer not to have people reply back to the wrong account and then have to spend time moving things around to keep them organized.
Outlook.com has recently made an improvement in their service where you can now select from any of your imported/added email accounts or aliases by selecting a drop-down arrow and when the email is sent, it will no longer have the unwanted email address in the header.
Configure Outlook.com
From the web interface, click on the gear in the upper right, then go to ‘more email settings’, then, ‘your email accounts’.
Be sure to the select the second option – to add a send-and-receive account. Then, fill in the credentials of the email account you want to add and click ‘next’. After processing a few moments, your new account should be set up. I added a cox.net account and Outlook figured out the correct settings for the account. If you have problems, you’ll need to go to the particular email service you want to use and find the settings you need.
You’ll then be asked where you’ll want your new account – do you want it to be dumped in your in-box to be co-mingled with your other mail, or do you want it in its own folder. You decide where and what you want to name it.
If you want to bring your Gmail into Outlook.com, I’ve read fromPaul Thurrott’s blog post on this subject that you may need to go to your Gmail settings and enable POP access. When I moved my Gmail over, I didn’t have to make that setting, so not sure why, but if you have problems, read his tip. He also noted that if you are using 2-factor authentication with your Google account, you may need to make some adjustments.
It’s still up to you (the user), to remember to select the correct email account you want to reply from. You have a default ‘from’ address already set up in Outlook.com and it will be the Microsoft account you originally set up. So you can either change the default, or get in the habit of checking the ‘from’ address carefully before you click on Send.
If the ‘on-behalf-of’ message has been holding you back from aggregating all your email to one place, now you can move forward to get email in one place.
What’s your experience been and which email service do you prefer and why?