How to configure Gmail to send mail as your custom domain and email address

Hawk Host recommends that you both access and send email right from Hawk Host servers; however, we understand that this may not always be possible or desired. If you are forwarding your email to a Gmail address and want to use the “Send mail as” feature in Gmail, there are additional steps to ensure your email messages arrive in the user’s inbox as youremail@yourdomain.com.

Prerequisites

In order for Gmail’s “Send mail as” feature to work, you will need an email account set up on your domain in cPanel on Hawk Host’s servers. If the email address you intend to use in Gmail already exists, you can use its details; otherwise, we recommend setting up an email address such as gmail-youremail@yourdomain.com. In both cases, you will need the password to complete the setup.

You can follow the guide How to Create an Email Account to set up an email account if needed.

Gmail Setup

1. Login to Gmail
2. Click the gear icon, and the menu will have a “See all settings” button, which you will click
3. Click the “Accounts and Import” option
4. Locate the “Send mail as” option and then click “Add another email address”
5. In the pop-up, select your desired name and the email address you will use to send from.
6. You will now need to provide the settings of your SMTP server. The details are as follows:
   1. Server: mail.yourdomain.com or the hostname of the server you are on.
   2. Port: 587
   3. Username: The username of the email address you set up in the Prerequisite portion.
   4. Password: The password to the email address you set up in the Prerequisite portion.
   5. Encryption: Select TLS for encryption
   Once filled out, click “Add Account”
7. Gmail will then send you a verification email to confirm that you are the owner of your email. You will need to click this link before you send send as your email address.

At this point, you should now be able to use the “Send mail as” option in Gmail, and the messages will arrive rather than bounce back.

Reasons to use this method

You will avoid SPF, DKIM and DMARC issues that can cause your emails to be marked as spam or rejected by recipient servers. For example bounces such as:

550 5.7.9 This mail has been blocked because the sender is unauthenticated. Yahoo
requires all senders to authenticate with either SPF or DKIM. Authentication results:
DKIM = FAILURE - SPF yourdomain.com with ip 209.85.210.49 = FAILURE. See
https://senders.yahooinc.com/smtp-error-codes/#authentication-failures for more information.