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I am planning to transfer my mail server to Google Apps, and I am wondering whether this will work:

In my infrastructure there are some scripts that send emails from addresses that do not exist, for example:

The filters in email clients rely on these addresses to sort the incoming mail and keep the messages in the right locations.

There are no mailboxes that correspond to these addresses, they are "send only" (i.e. replies are never expected).

Will this be possible with a Google-hosted email service?

Or must I create these addresses in order to be able to send emails that have them in the FROM field?

The trouble is that I have quite a lot of such addresses, so if I create actual mailboxes for them, I will hit the limit of the free Google Apps account fast.

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You can send form valid aliases only. Any other e-mail from address will be changed to authenticated user default e-mail address.

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What you can do is create one master account to act as your 'services' account:

Then create aliases (Nicknames as google calls them) for that account (aliases/nicknames dont count towards the account limit):

Your scripts would need to use the master account to authenticate with Google, but the from: address would be set to one of the nicknames. (eg. an email client would create an account for the email address [email protected] but the login for the smtp server would be [email protected]

We have users with multiple custom aliases in place (rather than giving them 10 different accounts which would cost us 'x10 accounts'):

Example of nicknames in Google Apps user settings

You can make Nicknames by going to Domain dashboard -> Users and Groups -> Select the user account -> Click 'Add a Nickname'

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You can definitely send emails by setting your scripts to send from any email. I just tested this out with my PostageApp install by setting the FROM address as "[email protected]" and it sent it through no problem.

The real problem would be if anyone actually replied - the sender would get a bounce back email and that's not exactly a fantastic thing to see.

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I too am using this kind of system. I registered my domain, say, example.com for a google apps standard account and I only created one user. I set the option to enable catch-all so that emails that are sent to [anything]@example.com will be received at my inbox.

I can then use GMail filters to tag the emails appropriately.

I send emails from my webserver using arbitrary from addresses but that doesn't go through Google Apps. Also check this question related to this: Send mail from a Gmail catch all address

Even better, I added a domain alias, apps.example.com, so that all emails sent to [anything]@apps.example.com is forwarded to my webserver. My scripts could then parse the emails and respond.

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