If you have a custom email like yourname@yourdomain.com and you send an email to a Gmail user, you’ll notice your email comes in without a profile photo (or profile picture)! As a business, you’ll certainly want to have a profile photo, either your company logo or your face profile, whatever it is, this helps makes your email more authentic.

In this post, I will show you how to setup your yourname@yourdomain.com account so that when you send an email to a Gmail account, your profile photo will show up!  It does not matter if your email is hosted via Namecheap, WhoGoHost, ipage, etc or any webhosting or email hosting solution!  It doesn’t matter if you are sending your email from Gmail, horde, roundcube, SquirrelMail, or any other webmail client!

SOLUTION: Simply go to google.com, sign-out of your account. Create a NEW google account, and make sure to select the option to create it using your existing email address. Then use the yourname@yourdomain.com email address. This will create a Google account for your yourname@yourdomain.com. Now that you are sign in, go to google.com and click on the upper right hand corner Icon, it will let you change your profile of your Google account (which is now your Google Plus account linked to yourname@yourdomain.com). In the Google Plus account, simply update your profile photo and save it. It takes a few hours to update, and then BOOM, you’re done! That profile photo will show up as your email profile photo when you send emails as yourname@yourdomain.com!

After doing that, when you send emails, your email profile photo will finally show up! The email avatar is now the Google Plus Profile Photo!

Step-By-Step Solution:

So the problem we have is that the receiving party does not see a profile image when they receive your email.  Let’s update your profile photo, here are the step-by-step instructions:

The steps below include photos if you are a more visual person:

1. Go to Google.com and Sign out of your gmail account.

1. Click Sign in

1. Click on the arrow below so you can select “other account”

1. Select the option to Use another account.

1. Select the option to Create account.

1. Make sure to click on Use my current email address instead.

1.  Here’s where you put the email address you want to use.  Also note, if you don’t want a space between your First name and Last name, then just use the First name field and leave the last name blank.  I need up using RareUnicorns for the First name, and left the Last name blank.  So my email name shows up as “RareUnicorns” instead of “Rare Unicorns”.

1. Google will send a verification email to your personalized business email (yourname@yourdomain.com) email.

1. Open the verification email Google sent to your personalized business email (yourname@yourdomain.com) email.

2. Now go back to your google account creation page, and use the verification code provided in the email to confirm.

1. Fill out the profile information for your new Google Plus Account!

1.  Read through the Privacy and Terms, and then agree to move forward.

1. Go back to Google.com, then on the icon on the upper right hand corner, now select it, and then click on the “change” button to change your profile photo!

1. This step may take a while (maybe up to an hour!), to speed things up, try sending and receiving email for the new email account (back and forth with any gmail account).

1. After about an hour, you should see the profile photo get updated, like I see in the above image!

2. And now when you send an email, your receipt will see the profile photo:

I hope this article help!  If you find this article helpful, please share it with family and friends!  Also, feel free to post me a comment below. Thanks!