235671 - From: Address should be selectable just like Reply-To:

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 87987

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

Description

[Colin Guthrie]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040115

Here is a suggestion for Moz Mail (and prob. Thunderbird too).

I often send emails to mailing lists etc. which sometimes publish my email
address online (via archives etc).

For reasons of privicy, I often like to customise the email address I use when
posting to different lists.

e.g. I own the domain mydomain.com and have a "catch all" email system such that
[e-mail] comes to my mailbox. Say I'm posting to the "Mozilla"
mailing list, I would want my email address to be "[e-mail]". I
would want this to affect the From: field, not just the Reply-To: so that I can
hide my real, personal address from the list.

I doubt that this change would be too hard to implement.

As an improvment however, a new email account option could allow you to enter
your catchall email domain. This domain could be used to "guess" a custom From:
address header to be inserted when replying to list mail by looking at the To:
address (or other hidden headers) to see where the email was sent.

Apologies if this has already been requested, but I think it would be a useful
feature. Hopefully at least a few people will agree with me ;)

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Colin Guthrie]

Some more info (sorry for not submitting this originally).

Just looked into it and "X-Original-To:" would probably be a good header (in the
email to which you are replying) on which to base a guessed "From:" address for
the new email.

If the domain name in "X-Original-To:" matches your catch all domain,
automatically place a "From:" header in the compose window with that address in it.

I guess there could be another option (to go with the email catchall domain
option) to either show your name in this field (e.g. Colin Guthrie
<[e-mail]>) or just to put the address in without your name (for
reasons of privicy).

Comment 2

[Robert Accettura [:raccettura]]

Most just create a dummy account, and when you send, select that account.

Comment 3

[Colin Guthrie]

A dummy account would work for the most regular uses, but I make up addresses
all the time to send emails to webmasters and to complain to websites that don't
work in Mozilla and various other things. I usually create an email address that
would allow me to track them down later should that particular address make it
onto some mailing/spam list or other.

I still think it's a good idea, but I guess the public will speak!!

I wouldn't expect anyone to take this enhancement onboard anytime soon, but it's
the kind of thing I may have a crack at myself at somepoint should I ever find
any time!!

Comment 4

[TT]

There's a plugin that does this for you.  I'm trying to find it.  I'll post
again when I do.

Comment 5

[TT]

I finally found it: http://www.supportware.net/mozilla/#ext3

It's called "Freeform From and FCC on Compose".

Comment 6

[Colin Guthrie]

Many thank Timur. I was eagerly awaiting that second post!!

It certainly does 90% of what I want....

I think I'll mail the authors and ask them if they/I can improve it such that it
can have a per account setting called "Mail Domain" where you can enter the
domain at which all mail comes to you e.g. [e-mail] and
[e-mail] etc. all ultimately end up in a single mail box. That way the
extension can maybe look at the "X-Original-To:" header in an email you are
replying to and if that has a random name@your_mail_domain (e.g. mydomain.tld
above) then it can automagically fill in the Send Mail From box for you. This
would be 100% perfect for me! Also possibly a history of what you've typed
before would be cool to.

Anyways, these are more comments for the extension author not here. If anyone
feels this bug should be closed then I happy for that to happen.

Thanks again Timur.

Col.

Comment 7

[OstGote!]

As workaround you could use the Multiple Identies.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.phtml?title=Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_Multiple_Identities
Same for Mozilla Mailnews 1.8x.

What you mean is something like free-editable, see Bug 87987.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 87987 ***