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Removing the “On Behalf Of” Message from Outlook

Microsoft Outlook users who want to prevent Outlook from showing “X on behalf of Y” to the recipient can download our free Outlook add-on here, uncompress it, and run the setup.exe application.

Microsoft Outlook users who want to send e-mails from different e-mail addresses have to configure each account separately with their respective e-mail services configuration. If these e-mail addresses are really just forwarding addresses this is overkill. Some e-mail clients, like Mozilla Thunderbird, use “identities” for this purpose, while Microsoft Outlook offers an inadequate solution. In Outlook users can enable the selection of the e-mail address from which the e-mail will be sent (Options/Show From in the compose window) but the recipient is notified of the original account. For example, if alice@apartments.com chooses to send their e-mail as beatrice@apartments.com the recipient will see the message “alice@apartments.com on behalf of beatrice@apartments.com”. This is annoying because users who represent more than one organization or hold more than one position prefer to show only one e-mail address.

Our Outlook add-on is simple to use. It adds an “activate” state button in the compose window in the “on behalf remover” ribbon. If this option is selected recipients will not see the “on behalf of” message.

There are two caveats:

  1. Although e-mails are not received as “on behalf of” if the recipient inspects the e-mail headers internally it includes two e-mails in the “from” header and the same two in the “sender” header. This reveals the original account from which it was sent. If this is an issue you can use a default generic account like no-reply@yourdomain.com to hide it.
  2. This plugin works for sending e-mails via an SMTP server. Microsoft Exchange uses a different protocol.
  3. The add-in is not currently handling appointments. If you need this option just drop us a line in the comments.

Related Services

  1. Outlook 365 Plugin Development
  2. Reverse Engineering Services
  3. Application Packaging Services
  4. Data Loss Prevention Solution Development
  5. Custom Software Development Company

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Leave a comment

  1. Does this support Outlook 2003?

  2. Outlook 2007 / Windows 7. I get a message under the managed add-ins: the managed add-in loader failed to initialize. It remains in my inactive list of add-ins.

  3. yes, looks about 8 other add-ons already active

  4. Export to Mindjet MindManager
    Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging
    Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Colleague Import
    Micorsoft Outlook Mobile Service
    Mindjet MindManager Topic Alert
    Norton AntiSpam Outlook
    Redemption Helper
    Windows Search Email Indexer

    ok.. will try.

  5. It still doesn’t work. same result.

  6. doesn’t work still

  7. Are you there??
    Nektra.Outlook.AddIns.OnBehalfRemover.vsto

    is the ‘add-in’ file – is this correct?

  8. Our QA team will schedule a quick test for next week and we will give you the results. If it is a commercial requirement you can contact us for specific services at http://www.nektra.com

  9. Hi,

    is there a plug-in for OSX? Outlook for Mac 2011?

  10. does this work with office 2013?

  11. It installs OK for me but doesnt remove the “on behalf of” on the messages I send. I tried deactivating and activating it back but still doesnt work.

  12. Are you using gmail accounts? We noticed that gmail does not let modify “from” account

  13. Yeah, it is on a gmail account :/

  14. Brilliant! Thanks so much for this. Works in my Outlook 2007.

    Am interested to know whether you think the email may be more likely to get rejected as spam with the way the “From” and “Sender” emails are setup.

    Also as one of the main reasons for using an alternative email address is to protect your main email address from email address harvester viruses that may be on the recipient’s PC, do you think these viruses could get your real email address from the headers. If so it defeats the purpose really.

  15. oops – spoke too soon. It works, but I have to click on the “activate” button each time. Even though it is in the “activate” state it doesn’t work unless I click to deactivate and then activate again for each message I send. Still useful though,

  16. works great for me to send on behalf of someone, but when person replies it still comes to the original person who sent the mail. doesn’t send the mail back to the person who you’re trying to send as

  17. It was added as a desired feature. Right now we are not planning a new release of the add-on in the short term but you will be notified if there is a new one.

  18. Upon clicking the download link I got a warning saying that the site ahead contains harmful programs – anyone else get this or have issues – I’m hesitant to proceed as a result of this browser warning…

  19. I’m using the on behalf removal since a long time with Outlook 2016 both on Windows 7 and Windows 10.

    I’ve just installed a new WIndows 10 computer with Outlook 2016 and it’s not working despite several tries.
    The onbehalf remains in the sender field.

    Some idea ?
    Thank you for your help.

    Regards,
    Daniel

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