You just set up your new organization and you have your spiffy new Squarespace. You look like a pro, now you need to communicate like a pro.

For this example, I’m using the inhearts.org domain and I’m setting myself to send email as chris@inhearts.org rather than my Gmail address of highslot@gmail.com.

It takes 3 things to pull that off:

1. Create my branded chris@inhearts.org email addresses with Directra
2. Configure Gmail to use my newly branded email address.
3. (Optionally) Configure my iPhone Email app to use my branded address.

Today, I’m going to jump to Step 2, because my inhearts.org colleagues are eager to get started. I’ll cover Steps 1 and 3 in a follow-on post.

Gmail account settings

Go into Gmail and click on the Settings option.

You will see a navigation bar at the top of the page. Click on the Accounts option:

From there, you will get a screen that has something like this. We are interested in the “Send mail as” section (see the red arrow):

Here you’ll see how I’m currently set up:

1. Existing highslot@gmail.com address assigned by Gmail
2. Existing branded chris@ibeck.com email that I setup previously
   1. Notice this is my default
   2. Also notice my SMTP server is “smtp.forteinc.com” (more on this later)
3. “When replying to a message” should be “Reply from the same address the message was sent to” (very important) so Gmail will:
   1. Reply to a message sent to highslot@gmail.com with that same address
   2. Reply to a message sent to chris@ibeck.com with that same address

Add another address

Click “Add another email address you own” (in the red box above) to get this pop up:

1. Enter you Name and Email.
2. Leave “Treat as an alias” checked

1. For now you can accept the default of “Send through Gmail”
2. But it’s way better use an SMTP service – I will cover this in a future blog.

1. Press “Send Verification” and you are almost done

Verify the new email address

Gmail is very security-conscious and they don’t want you sending email with a from address you don’t own — like president@whitehouse.gov. So Gmail gives you two options for verifiying that you own the newly branded email address by sending an email to that address (i.e., chris@inhearts.org) like this:

1. The simplest thing to do is just click the link in the red box.
2. Or you can copy the confirmation code next to the red arrow and paste it here:

Using your branded email

Now, when you compose a new message, you’ll see a From box on the new email:

My default From address is chris@ibeck.com (from my Settings above) But now I can easily pick chris@inhearts.org when I want to use that address Best of all, when I reply to an existing message sent to either chris@ibeck.com or chris@inhearts.org, Gmail will automatically use the correct one for me. This makes it easy for me to manage all my email addresses in a single account without having to remember which one to reply with.

Now, if only there was a way for Gmail to figure out which one use when I compose a new message. Hmmm…

Emailing like a pro

Donors and followers of www.inhearts.org no longer get unprofessional-looking emails from highslot@gmail.com or even chris@ibeck.com. Now, I look like a pro using chris@inhearts.org thanks to Directra and Gmail.