Gmail started misbehaving for some people right around the time the Android was introduced (coincidence?), but attempting to resolve this problem led to the discovery of a cool way to make Gmail work better on your iPhone.

Here's a way to get better Gmail on your iPhone.

No, not the Better Gmail add-on for Firefox—which is wonderful in its own right, but doesn't help you much on an iPhone (which, for one thing, doesn't run Firefox).

Here's the problem in a nutshell: I tried using the Mail application on my iPhone as my means of reading and sending Gmail, but I found there was one major issue: it used my gmail.com address (which I don't normally use) rather than my personal address associated with my own domain—what Gmail calls a "custom address".

In a nutshell: when you use the Gmail desktop interface, you can choose a default address (it doesn't have to be the gmail.com address). That default address is your "From" address in sent email unless you specify otherwise. (If you have a number of custom addresses, you can also tell Gmail to set the From address in replies to whichever one the mail was explicitly addressed to.)

The point of all this being: the Mail application on the iPhone was unusable for me, because it kept sending email with what I considered the wrong address. (It was correct in that replies to the email would indeed be directed to me, but it was not what I wanted recipients to see in the "From" line.) For this reason, I switched to using Safari to access the web-based mobile version of Gmail.

This was an acceptable compromise until last week, when suddenly for no apparent reason I could not send replies to emails that had been sent to me. Gmail produced an absurd message that said "Some addresses in the From field were not recognized." First of all, you're only supposed to have one address in the "From" field of an email. (So why "some addresses"?) And second, "From" addresses aren't just pulled out of thin air, they are pre-vetted by Gmail before an email can be sent. Gmail can only set your "From" address to an established address that you've already set up and verified.

In other words, you can't just decide you want to send email as "w@whitehouse.gov" or "alaskagov@yahoo.com", you have to prove to Gmail that you actually own the referenced email address, via a series of tests and confirmation messages. (See the Google support article for details.)

Needless to say, this problem where Gmail insisted that your "From" address is somehow wrong has been rather annoying. Although intermittent, it naturally seems to crop up at the worst possible time (when you need to send a critical response to someone immediately from your mobile device and can't wait until you arrive at your office or at home to send it).

Then I came upon a note on Gmail's What's New page. Apparently I could configure the iPhone's Mail application to use not a preconfigured Gmail account, but a custom IMAP account that established my personal-domain-based email as my "From" address. It's not at all difficult, you get to use a custom address as your "From" address, and the annoying unfounded error message is a thing of the past. (So far...) The feature has actually been around for over a year, but this was the first time I tried it. Sure enough, email sent by me using the iPhone Mail app now has the desired "From" address. As of yesterday I switched from using Safari (to access the mobile Gmail web site) to using the iPhone Mail app.

(According to the latest entries in the thread, the "bad From address" problem is still occurring to some people and the issue is still unresolved.)