273526 - Make the email addresses in the To: field an option for the From: field when doing a reply.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Niels Basjes]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

I have several email addresses that are forwarded to a single inbox. Now If I
reply to such an email I would like that email to appear as if it was sent by
the address the original email was sent to.
So if someone sends an email to [e-mail] and I hit reply I would like to
see [e-mail] in the from field instead of my regular email address that
has been specified in the account settings. 

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Make sure an email address that is not your own is delivered into your inbox
2. Sent an email to that address
3. Open the email your received and hit reply.
4. Now I would like to have the option to select the From to be the same as the
To: where that email was sent to.

Actual Results:  
I can only select the existing accounts.

Expected Results:  
I would like to specifiy something different than what has beens pecified in the
existing accounts.

Comment 1

[OstGote!]

Why don't you use Identities and Global Inbox (for several accounts)? Then TB
would choose automatically the right From: address.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.phtml?title=Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_Multiple_Identities
http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.phtml?title=Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_Global_Inbox

Comment 2

[Niels Basjes]

I use for every email I sent to companies a different email address of the form
 <companyname>@<mydomain> . These are all delivered to my catch-all email
account. Having to set an identity for each alias I use would mean a lot of work
(i use _many_ email addresses.

What I would therefor like is to have what you could call an automatic form of
identity that bases the available identities on the To: field of the original email.

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 299499 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Chris Carr]

Virtual Identity does what Niels wants. http://absorb.it/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=VirtualIdentity. I manage my addresses in a similar manner and gave up creating new identities after about 50. It's way too much work.

Comment 5

[Ulf]

I have a similar Problem. Or (I think) it´s more a feature request!?

I have also a catch-email-account. A private one here at home (a little mail-server). When I got an E-Mail (catched by my mail-server account) and answer, TB sets this catch-email-adress in the from-field, instead of the original adress, where the email was sent to.

That problem is sometimes really annoying.
And it is not only a little usage (or type of using TB) problem. I think it is a not existing feature.

So maybe you get an email, reading it and the sender want to have a request that you read the email. There is this info-box asking if you would like to let TB send a receipt to the sender of this email (you can change this behaviour in the options).
Now TB choose the false email adress, because you catch them all from one adress. TB normally have to answer with the former email adress us in the "to" field from the recipient.

Because I use this private email-server at home (and have a dial in account), my accept receipts will never arrive at the senders inbox, because free mail accounts (like gmx, yahoo...) normally block every email, sent from a dial in host.

The normal behaviour is:
- TB download the email from the mail-account
- TB choose for answering, receipt sending, ... a.s.o. the email adress, where the email was sent to, instead of the account, where it download the email.


Maybe it is a good idea to let the user choose for each account if he/she wants to anser/send receipts/... with the recipients email adress or with the email adress where the message was downloaded.

Comment 6

[Rolf Leggewie]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Virtual Identity does what Niels wants.
> http://absorb.it/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=VirtualIdentity.

Thank you for providing that link.   I have since it myself and am very satisfied with it.

I suggest to mark this bug as wontfix.  There already is a plugin to get the desired behaviour.  Let's not bloat TB further (although I depend on this feature myself!)

Comment 7

[timeless]

I'm not quite sure where i sit on this, w/ gmail I manually prove to gmail that i control each account and then I can set it to auto reply with it, that's equivalent to what thunderbird does today w/ its accounting. But it's fairly inconvenient, I have 20-50 accounts and gmail trusts me for ~5 of them. For the rest, I fall back to one of the primaries. If I used tb (I can't, it can't open my inbox), I'd probably want that extension integrated (or at least signed as trusted by someone who works on tb).

Comment 8

[Rolf Leggewie]

(In reply to comment #7)
> (or at least signed as trusted by someone who works on tb).

That sounds like a reasonable request.