If you have a Gmail account, you can use it to read e-mail from your account on our servers:

• If you want to use Gmail to view a copy of each incoming message, you can forward your email to your Gmail account.
• If you want to be able to send mail from your address using the Gmail interface, you can configure Gmail to send outgoing mail through our servers.

The sections below explain more:

• Forwarding messages to your Gmail account
• Using Gmail to send messages
• Did you previously set up Gmail to send through their servers?

Forwarding messages to your Gmail account

To get started you can set up a forwarding address in our control panel to forward messages to your Gmail email address. We’ll forward a copy of each message to Gmail, and it will arrive in your Gmail Inbox.

Note that if you set up your mail this way, you can’t test it by sending a message from your Gmail address to an address that forwards back to the same Gmail address. Gmail shows such test messages only in your Sent Mail, not your Inbox. See our “Gmail Discards Forwarded Messages” page for more details.

If you do this, we recommend also making your address be a mailbox on our servers. That way, our servers will store a copy of every received message (in addition to forwarding it to Gmail). That allows you to use our webmail pages to read messages if you can’t find them at Gmail for some reason (for example, if Gmail erroneously decided a forwarded message was spam).

Using Gmail to send messages

Gmail also allows you to send messages from your email address if you’ve created a mailbox for that address on our servers.

You can only send like this if you have a mailbox on our servers for the address. If an address is merely a forwarding address, you’ll need to also create a mailbox to be able to send from Gmail, even if you don’t ever read the mailbox contents on our servers.

Once you’ve created the mailbox on our end, you’ll need to set it up in Gmail. Their Send emails from a different address or alias page has more details about it. (If you're using “Google Workspace” rather than just Gmail, you may first need to explicitly enable the option to “allow users to send mail through an external SMTP server”.)

From the main Gmail Inbox page, go to the Gmail settings page (an icon of a gear), click See all settings, click Accounts and Import, find the “Send mail as” section, then click Add another email address. This window will appear:

Enter your name and email address, leave “Treat as an alias checked”, and click Next Step.

Gmail will show you a new window that often guesses some default settings that are incorrect. Use these settings instead of the ones Gmail guesses:

• SMTP Server: mail.tigertech.net
• Port: 587
• Username: your full email address (all lowercase)
• Password: your email password
• Choose Secured connection using TLS (recommended)

It should look like this screenshot:

Then click Add Account.

Gmail does require you to verify the address before you can send from it. You can do this by clicking Verify next to the address under the "Send Mail As" section, and they will send a message with a link you will need to click.

Once you do that, when you compose a new message in Gmail, you should be able to choose the From address as either your normal Gmail address or “address@example.com”.

Did you previously set up Gmail to send through their servers?

If you set up Gmail to “send mail as” your domain name in the past, they may have offered to let you “send through Gmail”, like the screenshot below:

If you chose “send through Gmail” instead of the option to send through other SMTP servers, you may now find that your sent messages get flagged as “spam”, get rejected because “the sender is unauthenticated”, say “sent via Gmail.com” next to them, or say that “Gmail could not verify that this message actually came from example.com” — even when you view the received message using Gmail itself!

That happens because the “send through Gmail” option had no security that checked the sender’s identity. Gmail has since removed that setup option because it causes this problem, but they’ve allowed some people to keep sending mail like that if it was already set up that way.

If that applies to you, you can simply delete the existing “send mail as” option in your Gmail settings by going to the Gmail settings page (an icon of a gear), clicking See all settings, clicking Accounts and Import, then deleting the account in the Send mail as section. Then re-add the address to the Send mail as section as described above.

Gmail only allows you to set it up the secure way now, so deleting and re-adding it will automatically solve the problem.

Having trouble sending?

We’ve occasionally heard that customers who follow the instructions above see a message saying:

If you see this message, it usually means that example.com or the Gmail account was previously connected to a G Suite (“Google Apps”) account that includes sending restrictions. The “domain administrator” they’re referring to is the administrator of that G Suite Google account, not us. (We can’t fix this for you — it’s a restriction Google has added on their end.)

Google should be able to help with this, but the short version of the solution is that the domain administrator should login at admin.google.com, then choose Apps > Google Apps > Gmail > Advanced Settings > Allow per-user outbound gateways. (However, Google sometimes changes where this setting is located, so you may need to hunt around for it.)

What happened to the Gmail POP3 mail fetcher?

Gmail used to offer a mail “fetcher” that allowed to to import mail from other servers like ours on an ongoing basis, without adding forwarding. Unfortunately, Google has removed this feature on their end, so you now have to use forwarding.