Remove "On Behalf Of" from Messages Sent Using Gmail

Gmail has a feature that lets you send messages from other addresses. "Gmail's custom 'From:' feature lets you use Gmail to send messages with another of your email addresses listed as the sender in place of your Gmail address. This way, it's easier to manage multiple accounts from the Gmail interface."

A small inconvenience is that Google needs to include your primary email address in the headers and some mail clients inform users that the message is sent "on behalf of" a different address. Outlook is the biggest offender, especially for business messages sent from a a Gmail address "on behalf of" a custom domain.


Some suggested that Gmail should stop including the primary email address in the headers, but that's a major faux pas, since Gmail needs to authenticate the messages sent using its SMTP servers. "The reason we include your address in the headers at all is to help prevent your mail from being flagged as spam by your recipients' email services. For those who want the technical details, we use the 'Sender' field to be consistent with DomainKeys, a commonly used email authentication mechanism. If we didn't do this, your messages may get sent to your recipients' spam folders, which would be worse than the annoyance the current implementation is causing," explains Google.

The solution for this problem is not very elegant, but Google implemented it: you'll need to send the messages using the email provider's SMTP servers. Go to Gmail's settings page, select the Accounts tab, click on "edit info" next to the account you want to edit and then click on "Save changes". For some reason, this doesn't work for Gmail addresses and Google doesn't make the changes behind the scenes.


"We recognize that your other address might not have a server that you can use to send outbound messages — for example, if you use a forwarding alias rather than an actual mailbox, or if your other email provider doesn't support authenticated SMTP, or restricts access to specific IP ranges. For this reason, we've kept the original method as well," mentions Gmail's blog. The original method sends the messages using Gmail's SMTP servers.

More Search Results from a Site

Most search engines limit the number of results from a domain to make the list of search results more diverse and balanced. Even if Wikipedia has a lot of useful articles about "recursion", you'll only see the most relevant 2 results, followed by a link that invites you to check the full list of results from Wikipedia.

Google replaced the link with an expandable plusbox that lists 5 additional results from a site without having to open a new page.

Find Web Pages from a Certain Date Range

Google's web search toolbelt has been updated and it now includes an option that lets you find web pages from a user-defined period of time. After performing a search, click on "Show options", select "Custom date range" and enter at least one of the two dates.

Until now, you could only find images from the past 24 hours, the past week or the past year. If you edited Google's URL, the feature could be used to find pages from the past 10 days, 2 months or other custom periods of time, but you couldn't use it to find pages from 2006.


"Google tries to estimate the publication date for a page by using information such as the date Google first crawled the page," explains Google's help center. Google also uses the dates included in web pages if they are good candidates for the published date. Since Google's date is only an estimation, it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Power tip: The new feature is the only way you can find videos from a certain date range in Google Video. Just restrict the results to "videos".

Toolbelt for Google Image Search

Google's image search engine added an expandable toolbelt with search options that allow you to refine the results without visiting the advanced search page. Much like web search and Google Video, the image search engine exposes some options that were already available, but they were difficult to find.

You can pick the size by choosing medium, large, icon, by specifying the exact size or by selecting "larger than" and choosing one of the lower bounds. For example, you can restrict the results to images larger than 2 MP (1600x1200).

Other options include the type of image (face, photo, line drawing, clip art) and the colors (black and white, full color, predominantly red, predominantly blue etc.).


Let's find 2MP+ photos that are mostly gray and they include penguins.

Google Docs Integrates with Google Search

After using the PDF viewer from Google Docs for previewing PDF search results, Google started to enhance the cached version of XLS results with links to Google Docs. If you search for Excel files and click on "view as HTML" next to one of the results, you'll see three new options: a download link, a link to the HTML version and an option to edit the spreadsheet online using Google Docs.


I also found a quick way to view an Excel file in Google Docs:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?url=URL_OF_THE_XLS_FILE
(replace URL_OF_THE_XLS_FILE with the actual URL)

Birthday Calendar for Google Contacts

Google has recently added a birthday field in Google Contacts and many people asked for an integration with Google Calendar. Creating a birthday calendar shouldn't be very difficult: Google created one for orkut friends, even if the calendar has a lot of limitations.

Until Google adds this feature to Google Calendar, you can try a third-party application that generates a public calendar for the birthdays associated with your contacts. The application uses Google App Engine and Google Contacts API, so your password is safe. Another good thing is that the calendar is updated automatically when you add new birthdays or you edit the existing ones. Add notifications if you want to receive an email or an SMS one day before each birthday.

The major downside is that the calendar generated by the service is public, so anyone who knows its URL can see it. To use the service, you need to grant it access to your address book and Google recommends to do only if you trust the site. It's always a good idea to export your Gmail contacts before using an application that is allowed to has write access to your data.

Update: Google Calendar added the same feature. Go to the Settings page, select the Calendars tab and click on "Browse public calendars", then add the calendar "Contacts' birthdays and events". Unfortunately, Google's built-in calendar doesn't support notifications.



For some of your contacts, you'll see their birthdate even if you didn't add it to Google Contacts. It's likely that the information is obtained from Google Profiles.

{ Thanks, WebSonic.nl. }

Bing Becomes the Main Alternative to Google Search

Microsoft and Yahoo announced a partnership that will allow Microsoft to better compete with Google by consolidating its market share in search and search advertising. Microsoft will acquire a 10 year license to Yahoo's search technology and it will power Yahoo Search.

Bing will become Google's main competitor in search, with a market share of about 28% in the US (comScore, June 2009) and about 11% worldwide (StatCounter). After a successful relaunch in May, Microsoft's search engine didn't convince many people to switch from Google. Bing's ranking algorithms have been improved and Microsoft has a lot of interesting specialized search engines (a great interface for image search, an excellent travel site), but the overall experience doesn't offer too many reasons to use Bing as your main search engine.

"Through this agreement with Yahoo!, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company. Success in search requires both innovation and scale. With our new Bing search platform, we've created breakthrough innovation and features. This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness," said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO.

"As a result of the deal, Microsoft, which has great technologists and deep pockets, will have the scale to bring users faster, more useful and more personally relevant search. Competition equals innovation. But with one player dominating 70% of search, that field has been pretty lopsided. This transaction will create a healthy competitor that’ll keep everyone on their toes," said Carol Bartz, Yahoo's CEO.

I don't think scale is the missing ingredient from Bing's recipe: Google managed to create a search engine that offered great results even when it was just a small project. "Google ended 1999 averaging about 7 million searches each day, a roughly 70,000% increase over the 10,000 searches per day that were performed on the Google site in December 1998," announced a newsletter from 2000. Microsoft should focus on innovation, on finding new ways to improve search quality and to make the results more useful, instead of trying to better compete with Google.

Publish PDF Files in Google Docs

One of the big changes from last week's Google Docs update is that the sharing features are more consistent.

For example, you can now publish a PDF file by clicking on "Share", selecting "Get the link to share" and checking "Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)". While the file becomes publicly available, you still need to log in using a Google Account, despite Google's claim that no sign-in is required.


Until now, spreadsheets had an unique feature that allowed you to collaborate with anyone that received the link to the spreadsheet, without even having to log in. The feature is now available for documents and presentations, so it's easier to collaborate with many people.


Try the new features:

1. Read some Gmail tips from Google in a published PDF file.

2. What do you expect to see in Google Chrome OS? Collaborate on a Google Docs document and share your thoughts.

{ Spotted by Jérôme Flipo. }