Recently, I needed to find a way to send emails from a web-based application so that it seemed, to the recipient, as if the user initiating the action was doing the sending (as opposed to the application). Gmail, however, prevents spoofing of emails: If you set the “from” field to an email address that differs from the actual email address of the account you are using to send, Gmail automatically resets the “from” field to the account email address.
What you can do, however, is tell Gmail what the name should be: “Bob Smith” <app-email-account@example.com>. Then you can also set the reply-to to the user’s actual email address: bob.smith@example.com. Now when an email sent with a from/reply-to as described above arrives in my inbox, I see that I’ve received an email from Bob Smith (from the account app-email-account@example.com, but only if I look at the details). When I hit reply, the “to” field of my email is set to bob.smith@example.com.
To clarify, the from/reply-to fields should look as follows:
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