#413 ✓resolved
Max Masnick

Feature request: allow specification of SMTP server for a given "From" address

Reported by Max Masnick | July 6th, 2013 @ 08:22 PM

I have two email accounts:

1) My main email account (FastMail)
2) A Google Apps account for my university. This is forwarded to my FastMail account.

FastMail's web interface allows me to associate a SMTP server with a "personality", i.e. my university email address. This way, when I reply to a message sent to me@university.edu, my reply will be sent from me@university.edu via Google App's SMTP instead of FastMail.

I don't believe there is a similar feature in MailMate. Right now when I reply to a message sent to me@university.edu, my reply is from me@fastmail.fm and sent via FastMail's SMTP server.

If I am correct, it would be great if it was possible to support this feature. Thank you!!! <3<3<3

(I think there are some similar tickets to this feature request, but none looked like they were about this specific and, I believe, somewhat common situation.)

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • benny

    benny July 8th, 2013 @ 09:03 AM

    First, the fact that your reply is from me@fastmail.fm indicates that MailMate does not know the me@university.edu address. You can fix that by adding it to “Email Address(es)” in the IMAP account settings (double-click the account under SOURCES). I'm not sure which account you should add it to (see below), but note that it is a comma-separated list and you can also include alternative names if needed. Read more here.

    Second, each IMAP account is paired with an SMTP account in MailMate. Maybe you'll get what you want by specifying the same SMTP account for both IMAP accounts?

    Let me know if you cannot make any combination of the above behave as you would like it to.

  • benny

    benny October 10th, 2013 @ 10:23 AM

    • State changed from “new” to “resolved”

    Cleaning up old tickets. I'll assume this issue was resolved.

  • Max Masnick

    Max Masnick November 15th, 2013 @ 01:33 PM

    Ok, this is actually still a problem for me, so I'm going to try again. This is a little bit involved, but it is the one thing preventing me from using MailMate.

    I have two email accounts I want to use with MailMate:

    1. I have my primary email account, example@masnick.org, which is hosted by FastMail.
    2. I then have my work email account, example@umaryland.edu, which forwards automatically to example@masnick.org.

    The problem is sending email. I put in the FastMail SMTP settings for my primary account so that works fine. The issue is with my work account. My goal is to:

    1. Send emails from example@umaryland.edu with the correct SMTP server (smtp.umaryland.edu).
    2. Save emails sent with smtp.umaryland.edu in my FastMail "Sent" folder.

    FastMail's web app has the concept of "personalities", which let me specify different SMTP servers for each "from" address I use to send mail. This lets me select example@umaryland.edu as the "from" address and FastMail will do exactly what I want: (1) send the email from smtp.umaryland.edu and (2) save the message to my FastMail "Sent" folder.

    Gmail and other desktop apps like Postbox have similar functionality, making me think I'm not the only one who wants to do this. I actually think it's a pretty common use case that was pioneered with Gmail. Back in the day, you might have a work account on some other system that will let you forward to your fancy new Gmail account, and the send-with-external-SMTP feature in Gmail let you use your Gmail account for everything while making it look to the rest of the world like you're using your normal work email.

    MailMate unfortunately doesn't have this capability. This would be fine if the workaround I describe below worked.

    I figured this out because Mail.app unfortunately does not do this either. Here's what I did:

    The wrinkle here is that because I have to add example@umaryland.edu as an account in order to send mail with smtp.umaryland.edu, I would get two copies of all my sent mail. But because my umaryland.edu account is actually a Google Apps email account, I'm able to turn off IMAP access to the sent mail folder, hiding the sent mail from Mail.app. This system works perfectly.

    In MailMate, it almost works. The only problem is that when the umaryland.edu sent mail folder isn't available via IMAP, I get this persistent error message: http://tmp.m-n.us/m/Screen_Shot_20131115_at_8.24.45_AM.png

    When I have big annoying problems like this that I send to developers, I like to offer some naive solutions:

    1. Add "personalities" functionality (along with 10,000 other feature requests you've probably gotten).
    2. Make it possible to disable the nag message in the screenshot above with a "do not show again" checkbox.

    Thanks for listening. <3.

    Max

  • Max Masnick

    Max Masnick November 15th, 2013 @ 02:32 PM

    The third possible solution to this problem would be being able to exclude a subscribed IMAP folder from the "All Mail" superfolder. If I could just hide the messages in the umaryland.edu "Sent Mail" folder from the "All Mail" and thread view features, then I wouldn't have duplicates of every sent message.

  • Max Masnick

    Max Masnick November 16th, 2013 @ 04:23 PM

    I figured a work-around. Email sent from example@umaryland.edu (and bcc'ed to my primary email account) is now moved server-side into a "Sent from UMB" folder instead of the special INBOX.Sent Items folder. I then unsubscribe from this folder in MailMate and subscribed to the umaryland.edu real Sent Items folder (where emails sent through smtp.umaryland.edu land automatically).

    I still get duplicates if I send email through FastMail's web interface because it is smart enough to put a copy of any message in its INBOX.Sent Items folder regardless of the personality (read: SMTP server) it was sent with. But I rarely use that so I can deal with it.

    The TL;DR is that I am now able to use MailMate the way I want to. I'd love to see some feature to address this in a less byzantine way in the future, but it is certainly not urgent now (for me, probably never was urgent for you).

    Thanks, and congrats on blowing away your funding goal so early. It looks like you're going to get to keep working on MailMate for a long time, and I can't wait to see what you do!

    Max

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