Send mail from a Gmail catch all address

Question

I just recently set up Google Apps (Standard) on my domain, and I have a catch-all e-mail address on it that I pull e-mail from locally, so I can easily receive e-mail to anything@example.com. Now I want it to work in reverse -- I want to be able to send from any arbitrary address on my domain, by just including a From: foo@example.com header with my message. Unfortunately Gmail will rewrite the header to use whichever e-mail address I authenticated as. Since foo@example.com doesn't actually exist (the incoming e-mails to it are caught by the catch-all, so there's no need to make an actual foo account), I can't authenticate as it; I have to authenticate as my catch-all address, and then the e-mail shows up as sent from that address regardless of the From header. Gmail does support adding additional valid From addresses (in Settings -> Accounts), but I don't want to do that every time I have a new whatever@example.com I want to send from. Is there a way to tell Gmail/Google Apps "I control all e-mail from example.com, as long as the from address is on that domain just leave it alone"?

Answer 1

No, there is no way to do this at this time.

Your only option using Gmail's interface is to add the address as a "Send mail as" address.

Answer 2

As far as I know it's just not yet possible to "delegate whole domain" on gmail.

But you can do it using a IMAP client such as Thunderbird:

Better multiple identity and signature management. Set up multiple "identities" in Thunderbird with email address-specific signatures, which you can't do in web-based Gmail. Hit the "Manage Identities" button in your Account Preferences dialog. The various identities you choose will be available as a dropdown in the From: field in new messages, just like in web-based Gmail. You can also create and automatically attach a vCard to your outgoing messages on a per-identity basis with T-bird, and choose to compose your messages as HTML or plain text per identity, too.

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About your other unintended question that I accidentally took as the actual question before:

Is there a way to tell Gmail/Google Apps "I control all e-mail from example.com, as long as the from address is on that domain just leave it alone"?

Yes there is. Just add a domain alias!

It will behave just like you expect: it points everything from the alias to the main and makes all of them work seamlessly together.