Originally published at: How Gmail Users Can Configure an Email Alias in iPhone Mail - TidBITS
Frustrated by having to reveal his backend Gmail address, Adam Engst figures out how to configure Mail on the iPhone to use a Gmail alias.
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Just a note: you wonāt see App Passwords in your Google account unless you have turned on two-factor authentication (hence you did not notice that ā¦).
Good point! I didnāt even think about that because Iāve used that for many years, and I strongly encourage everyone to turn it on as well. Iāll add that to the article.
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Thanks for this post. Iāve also seen this nuance with iOS Apple Mail and have wondered how to solve for it. I have the same scenario with the email against my personal domain feeding through ānormalā Gmail (I used to have my personal domain email grandfathered in on Google Workspace but deleted that account when they went premium a few years ago and before Google reversed course and kept the grandfathered accounts free. 
).
Anyway, the question I have is that now, after following the instructions Adam outlined (which worked like a charm!) in Apple Mail iOS app, have my ānativeā Gmail account (username@gmail.com) INBOX as well as the āEmail Aliasā Gmail INBOX working on Apple Mail iOS. See below. Should I remove the native Gmail inbox? Or ādisableā Gmail since I still feed Contacts and Calendar from Google? Will I still receive emails sent directly to my username@gmail.com email address if I do this?
I think you could just turn off the Mail option for your native Gmail account so you keep Google Calendar and Google Contacts connected.
You should still receive email directly to native Gmail address because itās showing up in your Gmail account regardless of the incoming address.
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In the article you say you prefer the Gmail iOS app to Mail. Iām curious why. Unlike Gmail on the web or in Mimestream there is no way to easily label/file messages. Or is there something like that I never found?
In Mail app these days you can relatively easily a message to any folder.
With very few exceptions, I only label messages with filters. Thatās what I keep computers around for. Filing is for the 1950s, and Iām always able to find what I want with a search. 
Iām sure other peopleās situations and brains are different.
Tested it out and I did receive emails directed to my @gmail.com address with this set up. So all good!
Iām once again trying to stick with using Apple Mail on MacOS and iOS, anticipating the upcoming changes/improvements to the Apple Mail app, and this fix helped immensely. My habit has been that if I run into items or interactions within Apple Mail (iOS and MacOS) that I find annoying, I write them down in a running list. I hope to stick with Apple Mail but if the list becomes too long, I may have to go back to another mail solution (Gmail or Spark or something else).
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Interesting ā¦ but why not just use Workspace? Isnāt this what itās designed for?
Astonishing the lengths people will go to to use Gmailās interface though. And itās astonishing how willing Google are to help them do that, even when their mail is hosted elsewhere. Very commendable though! Sending via a third-party server, on request of the user, is very cool. I remember when Google Groups allowed one to send to third-party mailing lists using Googleās web UI, too.
Iām not for ālabelsā, FWIW. I think the IMAP model works fine for me, and though I do wish more email clients supported ākeywordsā, these have never been used in the same way Gmail uses ālabelsā, as a kind of metaphor for folders that behave slightly strangely in that you can have the same message in more than one of them without taking up space. Different strokes, etc.
I have used your system Adam for years. This is a different but related topic, about incoming emails rather than outgoing. My wife and I have three domains between us, all hosted by SiteGround, and emails to any of our email addresses end up in Gmail. I say āend up inā rather than āare forwarded toā since forwarding appears to be potentially problematic.
Everything seemed to work perfectly but from time to time I was made aware that some emails were not arrivingāfor example TidBITS newsletters. It transpired that forwarding emails is something that rings alarm bells for certain spam-catching functions. Some emails, though they were arriving on SiteGroundās servers, were being rejected as spam when forwarded. SiteGround claimed there was nothing they could do about this, and that the only, indeed proper, solution was to have Gmail collect the emails from our accounts on SiteGround. It is very easy to implement this, in Gmail settings, under Accounts and Import: Check email from other accounts.
I can report that getting email works perfectly this way. There is one downside: Gmail only checks other accounts automatically on an irregular and uncontrollable scheduleāmore or less every 30 minutes. If you are waiting for an urgent message you have to go into Gmail settings and click on āCheck mail nowā.
I was wondering if you or anyone else has experienced this problem when using mail forwarding. (Or does SiteGround employ a particularly sensitive spam catching routine.)
I use Siteground and I experience the same. I think their SPAM filters are very sensitive. Apparently if you move those emails routed to their Webmail SPAM folder to your Inbox on the Siteground webmail interface, apparently that tells their system that those emails are legit. We shall see if that comes true.
Thatās not the problem. Yes, some emails do end up in the spam folder, and yes, if you move these into your inbox itās supposed to train the system. I also have a stack of addresses Iāve added manually to my white list on SiteGround.
No the problem Iāve found is emails that donāt go into spam, and are sitting happily in my SiteGround inboxābut will not get forwarded. These are the ones whose characteristics are somehow causing a problem during the act of forwarding. But they do get picked up when Gmail is set up to collect mail from my accounts. (One of the factors that triggers the non-forwarding behaviour BTW is if the email in question has a priceāI guess therefore a currency symbolāin the subject line.)
Oh got it. That is interesting. I have not seen this behavior but will pay attention to it now. The point about the $ sign is interesting
Iāve used Gmail (for free) from well before Workspace existed, so I was never enthused about paying for a feature I already had for free. I also dimly remember that it wouldnāt work with whatever my setup was back in the day, but I canāt pull out the details.
For many people, a search-first approach works better.
is there a way to send a mail (in Gmail/iOS) to apple reminders and to link them back to gmail (iOS)?
Not that I know of. On the Mac, you could do this with Hookmark, I believe. @LucCogZest will know more.