Thunderbird: change "from" header to something else?

tools - account settings

 

Hi all,

I have recently made the switch to Mandrake Linux 10, which unfortunately
means I will have to do without my favourite e-mail client The Bat! I've
tested several e-mail clients and concluded that there is no e-mail client
with the same features as my The Bat! However, Thunderbird comes
reasonably close.

I was just wondering though: is it possible to change the "from" header
into anything I like? I have my own domainname with unlimited aliases and
I am finding it a great way to stop spam in it's track. Whenever I need to
signup for something, I give an alias and any mail sent to it is caught by
a catch all account. This makes it very easy to simply block all e-mail
from an alias when it is being abused for spam.

Will Thunderbird allow me to fill in every email address I like in the
"from" field? If so, how... cos I can't find it.

Regards,
Willem

 

From Willem van der Berg on 02/Sep/2004 17:44:

Yes it can, this was one of my requirements for switching from my -- now dated
-- previous email/news tool Turnpike.

You need to make sure that you have the latest version otherwise you have to
edit one of the prefs files by hand.

Go to Tools/Account Settings and select the appropriate account. You should see
a button marked "Manage Identities". Here you can add all of your identities for
that account.

After this, when you are replying to an email or news post you can select the
From address (identity) in a drop-down box. TB will try to pick the right one
for you by choosing the identity matching the one the email was sent to. Sadly
this is not as flexible as Turnpike which allowed the identities to be assigned
to folders as well -- that works great for mailing lists, I'm always forgetting
to change identities for these as the to address is not one of my identities but
the mailing list so TB doesn't know which identity to use. Still we are only at
version 0.7.3 so who knows what will appear in the future. Maybe someone will
even write an extension to do this?

Anyway, I digress, this should do what you want.

 

Thank you Julian, that was indeed what I was looking for. It is slightly
less convenient than being able to type anything in the "from" header, but
this will do nicely.

Willem

 

there is a really nice add-on called "virtual-identity"

it lets you enter a new email address for the from field always when you reply to an email. It suggests the original To-Field or the address you were using the previous time when you have sent an email to that recipient.

 

Ok, thanks. Just saw this, and it's working great.