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When I created my Gmail account, I used firstname.lastname as my username.
But now I would prefer to use firstnamelastname (without the dot in between) for everything - so it's the very same username according to Gmail's own rules.

I know that this doesn't make any difference for receiving mails (I know that mails to fi.RstnAm.elAs.tnaMe would be delivered to me as well)

How do I change the sender/"from" address in Gmail?

When I send mails, the sender displayed is always firstname.lastname. I tried to set up firstnamelastname as a sender in Gmail, but Gmail doesn't let me.

The error message is:

You can't send mails from [email protected].

Setting up different senders works perfectly with addresses from other domains (I have set up a few successfully), but apparently Gmail doesn't allow to set up different "spellings" of the same Gmail username as senders.

Any idea if this is possible at all?

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2
  • The FAQ suggests changing the e-mailadress, not adding a new send-from address.
    – Legolas
    Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 5:57
  • Yes, but only if you want a completely different username. I'm fine with just "changing the dots". Greg's answer works for me though.
    – Christian Specht
    Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 6:02

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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In Gmail go to Options (cog) → Settings → Accounts and Import

Under "Send mail as:" click on "Add another email address you own".

A popup will come out and under Email address, enter your "new" email address [email protected] and click next step.

This should close the window and now you should be able to send emails from your "modified" email address.

I've just tested it and it worked fine.

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4
  • As I already said in my question - I tried this, and it doesn't work ("You can't send mails from [email protected].").
    – Christian Specht
    Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 5:52
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    Damn, you're right! It does work! The reason why it didn't work first was a different one than I first expected: I'm in Germany and here, Gmail is called Google Mail because of copyright issues (the name Gmail was already trademarked). So my real address is actually firstname.lastname@ googlemail.com, not ...@ gmail.com. For receiving mails, [email protected] works as well, but apparently you can't use it as a sender. I got the error message when I tried to set [email protected] under "Send mail from another address". It works when I try [email protected].
    – Christian Specht
    Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 6:00
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    Worth noting that right now this doesn't work on the Gmail iOS client. You can select [email protected] as the email address to send from and it looks like it will go from that address. However once you've sent the email, you can go back to it and see that it actually went from your login address ([email protected]). I don't know how long it has been broken like that.
    – Richard
    Commented Aug 20, 2018 at 15:34
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    @Richard This is broken on the web app also.
    – Darren Alfonso
    Commented Feb 20, 2019 at 19:55

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