Sending emails from Gmail nickname

If you use the default iPhone Gmail IMAP (or MS Exchange) setup wizard, all emails will be sent from the primary Gmail alias. If you try to use an alias in the wizard it will not work as Gmail won’t allow you to log in using an alias. iPhone also doesn’t allow to manually enter custom email addresses in the “From” field.
Luckily you can work around this by setting account using custom IMAP setup.

Let’s say in Google apps you have primary email address john@domain.com and an additional alias (nickname) sales@domain.com. If you want iPhone to send emails from sales@domain.com perform following setup (you must have sales@domain.com alias already setup and activated in your Google Apps domain settings)

Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar > Add Account > Other > Add Mail Account

1. Name: Sales
   Address: sales@domain.com
   Password: ********
   Description: Gmail Sales
   NEXT
2. Incoming Mail Server
   Host Name: imap.gmail.com
   User Name: john@domain.com
   Password: ********
   Outgoing Mail Server
   Host Name: smtp.gmail.com
   User Name: john@domain.com
   Password: *******
   NEXT

This account will now send all emails from nickname: sales@domain.com
This will also allow you to sync email, but not Contacts and Calendar.

If you want to sync contacts and calendar as well add additional account using iPhone Exchange wizard, but disable Email at the end of the setup:

Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar > Add Account > Microsoft Exchange
Email: john@domain.com
Domain:
Username: john@domain.com
Password: ********
NEXT

Server: m.google.com
NEXT

Disable Mail and and leave only Contacts and Calendar enabled.
SAVE

Sending emails from more than one nickname

If you want to send emails from more than one “nickname” on the same iPhone you can add another account for your second “nickname” using the same instructions. There is one little issue – if you try to add another account with the same incoming server details in step 2, the iPhone tries to be clever and blocks you from saving settings saying that account already exists. You can cheat it by adding . (dot) at the end of the incoming mail server (imap.gmail.com.) this is still a valid DNS address and will resolve to the same IP.
This obviously means having duplicate accounts but you can set the second account to fetch emails manually.

Another option is to create a new empty Gmail account and use a new username and password in step 2 incoming mail server (step 1 and SMTP server details would be setup as per instructions). The advantage is that this account would always be empty so you wouldn’t waste storage space and battery live syncing a second identical account.

iPhone 3GS
iPhone 4
iPhone 4S
iPhone 5
iPad
Google Apps