#1366 new
Victor Yannacone

Adding automatic email address for Reply-To

Reported by Victor Yannacone | December 31st, 2015 @ 05:53 AM

I would like to add a permanent email address in the Reply-To line just as I did with bcc: from the hidden preferences instructions. Where do I find the code?

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • benny

    benny December 31st, 2015 @ 11:12 AM

    That's not currently supported. The closest is probably the hidden preference MmAdditionalComposerHeaders.

    Can I ask what your use case is? Usually this header would be used by mailing lists and similar -- and not for personal emails.

  • Victor Yannacone

    Victor Yannacone January 20th, 2016 @ 06:33 AM

    I have a number of incoming email addresses, however, when I send an email, unless I deliberately choose to use an alias I have only one outgoing email address. Now I have to fill it in on every outgoing email. I really would like "Reply To" to fill automatically the way the BCC does with your MM code.

    I gave up on Thunderbird and switched to MailMate after endless problems with the Thunderbird IMAP connections under OS-X Yosemite and El Capitan.

    I am very satisfied with MailMate so far and appreciate your effort and concern building the service and then maintaining it. I really enjoy your responses to many of these postings and thank you for considering mine.

  • benny

    benny January 20th, 2016 @ 11:15 AM

    Wouldn't you just want replies to use the incoming email address as your sender address? This can be done by simply adding all of your emails to the “Email Address(es)” comma-separated list in the IMAP account settings -- or use the address pattern feature. See more here.

    Let me know if this is not what you are looking for.

  • Victor Yannacone

    Victor Yannacone January 20th, 2016 @ 08:16 PM

    The separated list for email addresses does not do the job because no matter which of my many email addresses the incoming email sender might have used, if I choose to reply at all, I will reply using only one email address which may not be the incoming address.

    I really would like to have my outgoing emails preferentially show only the preferred "Reply To". If I want to use a different address, I will take the time to type in the new address, however, I want to make sure that if I forget the "Reply To" address it will always be my preferred address.

    Thanks again for creating and more importantly, maintaining, a great program.

  • benny

    benny January 20th, 2016 @ 08:55 PM

    Hmm, I'm still not getting it. Let's say your primary address is primary@example.com and all of your other addresses are named a@example.com, b@example.com, etc.

    Now you receive an email to b@example.com. Your reply uses primary@example.com as sender since this is the only address MailMate knows about. What would you want in the Reply-To header and why?

  • Victor Yannacone

    Victor Yannacone January 21st, 2016 @ 02:31 AM

    I must be missing something. When I receive an email to one of my sub accounts it comes the following header, for example:

    From: Verizon Notification verizon-notification@verizon.com

    To: vendorsvjy@yannalaw.com Subject: Updates Made to Your Verizon Account Date: 20 Jan 2016 16:10:57 -0500

    If I were to send a "Reply," the header of that reply would show that it came from vendorsvjy@yannalaw.com, but I want the reply to my reply to go to my primary address and I also want to show that it was sent from my primary address rather than the address the message had been sent to me by the sender.

    Now I understand the confusion and I apologize for the time it is taken you to help me stumble through the analysis.

    Apparently the "Reply-To" line is superfluous, and that the choice of "From:" on the line with signature and plain text choice is what I would like to preferentially send from my primary email address unless I specifically choose otherwise for a particular message.

    Considering how tight your code is and how efficient your program is, I do not understand the relevance of the "Reply-To:" line in the header.

    I believe now that I would like to modify is the "From:" choice under the heading boxes.

    Thanks again for your courtesy and the opportunity to chat with you. I regret the imposition on your time, however, I do appreciate your courtesy and consideration.

  • benny

    benny January 21st, 2016 @ 10:03 AM

    Ok, I think I understand the problem now. In order to make MailMate always use your primary address then you can only specify 1 specific address in the IMAP account settings. But that also means you won't have your aliases in the From menu when you need them in special cases and MailMate cannot automatically remove your aliases when replying. In this case I don't think “Reply-To” is a proper solution. You need some way to:

    1. Specify aliases without MailMate using these aliases for its automatic derivation of the From address (and instead defaulting to the primary address of the account).
    2. Still make these aliases available in the From menu.

    I'm thinking such addresses could perhaps be specified in the “Email Address(es)” field of the settings by separating them from the other addresses somehow. Something like:

    primary1@example.com,,alias1@example.com,alias2@example.com,,primary2@example.com,,alias3@example.com,alias4@example.com
    

    This would then trigger primary1 and primary2 to have default behavior while all the aliases behave as described above (but with two different primary addresses). (Think of ,, as start/end of lists of special aliases for the preceding email address in the list).

    I think item 1 might be useful for many users (although I have no requests) when they receive email for email addresses they no longer want to use. Item 2 is probably quite rare, because it's hard to see why you wouldn't want to reply from an address which you do want to use some times.

    I'm probably overthinking this, but have I at least understood the issue now?

  • Victor Yannacone

    Victor Yannacone January 22nd, 2016 @ 07:40 PM

    Again let me tell you how much I appreciate your concern over what must seem like a trivial problem.

    Your analysis is fine as far as it goes. The issue is to fix the "From:" address so that the default address I choose, which in this case will be my primary address, preferentially appears as the "From:" address, but all of the other addresses are still available for selection manually in the "From:" box.

    Each of my IMAP email accounts would permit me to use your suggested code, however, are you telling me that I should add

    primary1@example.com,,alias1@example.com,alias2@example.com,

    in each alias account?

    I tried it in one secondary email account and I did not manually change the "From:" setting and when I looked at the test mail, it showed it came from that secondary account. Did I do something wrong?

  • benny

    benny January 22nd, 2016 @ 08:21 PM

    It was purely hypothetical. I was thinking out loud to see if I had understood the problem correctly. I haven't implemented anything (yet).

    And to answer your question: The from-only-aliases would only be listed in the account in which the corresponding messages should be saved.

  • Victor Yannacone

    Victor Yannacone January 23rd, 2016 @ 12:48 AM

    Thanks again. I guess what I was groping towards is trying to understand how you can set a default with a line of code for the "bcc:" but not for "Reply to:" or "From:"

    I assume, obviously incorrectly, that the code structure for the three address boxes were the same and be addressed similarly. Apparently not.

    One of the things I appreciate about you and MailMate is how open you are to cooperating with your users and supporting them as well. I sincerely appreciate how free with information about the structure of the system such as the code fix for a default "bcc:" address.

  • Wes Carroll

    Wes Carroll November 6th, 2016 @ 08:34 PM

    • Tag set to reply-to

    Hi Benny,

    I am having what I think is a closely-related problem, but perhaps with a much-easier-to-implement solution:

    I have two email addresses a@mydomain.com and b@gmail.com. The mydomain address is for work; the Gmail address is personal; the server that manages my work email auto-forwards emails addressed to "a@mydomain.com" to my Gmail account, and I have Gmail filters separate it all back out again. (It's a little screwy, but it allows me to take advantage of Gmail's spam filtering and global search, and that turns out to be useful.)

    I have observed that when I send email from a@mydomain.com, and someone replies to it, the reply is addressed to b@gmail.com, which is not what I want, and I can't find a way to change the behavior. It's as though the reply-to header is always set to "b@gmail.com" independent of the address from which I sent the message (and indeed, that might be exactly what is going on. Unfortunately, I haven't yet figured out how to examine the full headers of my own emails in order to better diagnose this issue).

    The behavior I would like is that mail sent from "a@mydomain.com" has its reply-to set to "a@mydomain.com" and that mail sent from "b@gmail.com" has its reply-to set to "b@gmail.com".

    How might I accomplish this?

    To be clear, I think my question is as simple as "how can I set the Reply-to header to always be the same as the From header?"

    ...but perhaps the situation is more complicated than I realize (e.g. due to Google's non-standard IMAP implementation).

    On a related side note, if you could help me examine the email's full headers, I would be delighted to give additional information.

    Thanks in advance!
    Wes

  • benny

    benny November 11th, 2016 @ 02:23 PM

    @Wes: Sorry about the late reply. I think we already covered your problem in ticket #1571.

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