Multiple identities in one account with Apple Mail.app

Over the time I tend to accumulate mail adresses and accounts. Not so long ago, I decided to switch from a multiple mail accounts to a single imap account where I aggregated all others.

I used to be an Apple Mail.app user, but this switch caused me some troubles. How to specify different (legitimate) sender addresses with only one account configured ? I thought it was impossible and so decided to switch to Mozilla Thunderbird which allows you to set different sender addresses by account.

But recently, I found it was possible in Mail.app and here’s how :

In your account configuration, enter a comma-separated list of adresses in the “Email Address” field.

Multiple identities for one account

Then, you’ll be able to choose which sender address should be used when writing a new mail.

Choose which adresse to use when writing a new mail

For those of you interested in my configuration, I operate a simple linux box with Postfix, Courier-Imapd and Maildrop. Then I use Fetchmail to grab mails from my different accounts and put them in my imap setup.

[Update]
Drew leave a comment about a solution to have different names for each addresses. It require you edit the preferences plist file : Mac OS X Mail app config – EmailDiscussions.com

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 08:30 Posted in Apple

Tags apple, identity, mail

88 comments »

By George Razvan NICA 12 days later:

I, too, did bang my head against this for a long time, my solution being using different identities in my webmail interface for a few emails here and there. This time, ’though, I really need this on a regular basis and was about to turn my head back to Thunderbird. Not anymore. Thanks for the info, man.
By Jamie Wilkinson 27 days later:

Brilliant! I’ve been using multiple IMAP accounts that all access the same account but with server settings that point to different faux-subdomains to try to replicate this, a constant headache. No more! Thanks for sharing the find.
By Bart about 1 month later:

Wow,

I switched to thunderbird for the same reason, altough I was happy using Mac mail. I’m gonna try it immediately. Thanks.
By Ted Houston 3 months later:

Thanks for info, you saved me from installing Thunderbird, that’s great! ;-)
By Hank Hampel 3 months later:

Same problem here, tried to add fake accounts just to get this thing going with Mail.app. So thank you very much for saving me the trouble of adding even more fake accounts to my mail server!
By Dude 3 months later:

Wow, this is the same reason I was using thunderbird, but I wanted to switch back so I could sync iCal and Address Book using iSync which thunderbird didn’t do well at all.
By Chris 3 months later:

Superb tip! Thank you. I’ve been wondering how to do that for ages…
By Thanks 3 months later:

FInally, a solution. You have just solved the ONLY problem I had with Mail.app

Thanks for posting this.
By NOT solved the problem! 3 months later:

Hi everybody!
This “hack” may help many of you. But not me. Because I have multiple addresses from DIFFERENT domains. I aggregate them on one Imap-Account. But for sending an email with another domain, I need to setup DIFFERENT outgoing SMTP-Servers. And this is NOT possible with Mail.app. But many of the others have this feature, like thunderbird, KMail etc.
Sorry, that’s a major disadvantage!
So it’s not usable…

CU
By Jonathan Tron 3 months later:

You’re right, the problem is only partially solved. It only works if you, or your sys-admin, allows to send mails for domains not managed by your SMTP.
By that's no good idea... 4 months later:

Hi Jonathan, sending mails from another domain through an SMTP, which is not managing it, is no good idea! Most SPAM-Filters will recognize this and will rate this mails as spam. :-(
This SMTP will look like an open relay (different domain sender/smtp), so in addition to that, it could happen that the SMTP-Domain will be mentioned on RBLs (RealTimeBlackLists for SPAM-Domains).
So a real good admin will never do this ;-)

CU
By Jonathan Tron 4 months later:

CU > You’re right, it’s not a good advice for large smtp, but for home use this is not a problem. As for RBLs I’m not really a fan of these things, it’s so inaccurate and subject to errors that I’m not using it anymore… when your domains/ips got blacklisted because someone forged it and send spam as coming from you and you became blacklisted for no reason you’re lose most of your confidence on the system. Anyway I never said I’m a good admin nor does I said this solution should be used in large scale domains where “real good admin” managed the thing, but as a home solution it’s really great and so far I never encountered spam filtering refusing my emails.
So thanks for the comment I think it’s clarified some aspect not mentioned in my initial post.
By randy 5 months later:

I just posted a link to this post on my site. I have to say that it was a great find. How did you stumble upon this idea anyway?
By Jonathan Tron 5 months later:

Randy, it was a typo in an account setup that leads me to this “feature”.
By Jean 5 months later:

Thank! As a Mac-newbee with numerous mail identities you prevented me from switching to Thunderbird ;-)
By Philipp 6 months later:

Thank you so much for this post!
By Sophie G 6 months later:

I’m having problems still.. I regularly use two different names, one stage name, one passport name, and have two different email addresses with the different surnames. If I set up my account as you’ve suggested above it still asks for a name to use to describe the account – a name that gets applied to both of the email addresses, so I’m obviously only able to use just my first name for both
By Jonathan Tron 6 months later:

Sophie G : yes this does not solve all problems of multiple identities.
By Emilio 7 months later:

I’ve been hating Mail.app for a long time because I couldn’t group my different email identities under it. Thanks for sharing this knowgledge.
By www.craigatkinson.co.uk 7 months later:

for different domains you should go to your dashboard and forward the mail from one domain to the mailbox of the other. You then only need to use the one address with Mail.app but can send from them all.
By andrea 8 months later:

thank you so much. i was seriously thinking to go back to thundebird.
By Vincent 8 months later:

I have been using MailSwitch for many years now, and wrote a review of it, though I shall not plug that here. It is great for keeping domains and other things completely separate, simply switching out all the relevant / user / library files for you.
By Mat 11 months later:

This was a mystery to me too! This functionality is clearly a deliberate feature and Apple should have made that more obvious.

Cheers Jonathan
By DavidL 12 months later:

Awesome. Thanks for this tip. It allows me to forward me@mydomain.com through gmail (me@gmail.com) into Apple Mail but still be able to send mail from Apple Mail as if it was sent from me@mydomain.com.
By Koe 12 months later:

Dude, upgraded to Leopard and wanted to go 100% with mac mail. So icreated multiple mail boxes for each identity and then kept them offline. What a pain. Your solution is so easy.
By Lee 12 months later:

This is excellent! Just switched from linux/evolution to Leopard/Mail.app and this is a very much needed feature for me. Thanks for the post!
By Savard 12 months later:

This is a simple basic fix. I like it. Unfortunately, there are some other things to note… like switching signatures, and possibly your name (full vs. familiar) which is done exquisitely like Thunderbird. Now if TB were only better integrated with iCal I would switch.

Mac developers could learn a lot from Thunderbird… not to mention TB could benefit from Apple’s development team.
By Felix 12 months later:

super great tips! thank’s a lot!
By Richard 12 months later:

Thanks. Works on Leopard too. I can finally make the switch from thunderbird…
By mbuna 12 months later:

Very useful information. Thanks !
By Chad about 1 year later:

Here’s the problem I have. I do have multiple accounts and receiving them all through Mail is fine. However, when replying to an email, the default (main I think) account is the one the mail is being sent from – not necessarily the one it came in on.

Is there a way to set up Mail so that the reply mail account matches the incoming message? I know how to manually change from one sending account to another, but can this be set up automatically?
By Jorn Mineur about 1 year later:

Great idea, thank you for sharing it!
By Nick about 1 year later:

Thanks so much!
By Janik about 1 year later:

From me too: Loads of thanks!
By Antonio about 1 year later:

And you even can choose a different name for each one, just use:

Antonio <this@example.com>, Tony <that@mail.com>

;)
By Jonathan Tron about 1 year later:

Antonio : nice refinement
By Michael Wild about 1 year later:

Thanks a ton!

Btw: I use getmail, spamassassin, maildrop and dovecot on my linux box. Works like a charm!
By GJB over 1 year later:

Antonio, your suggestion does not function on the version of Apple Mail included with OS 10.4.11, or 10.5.1. :-( Which versions did you find this actually worked on?
By benish over 1 year later:

>Is there a way to set up Mail so that the reply mail account matches the incoming message?

It looks like in Mail 3.1 / Leopard 10.5.1 it will automatically switch the From: address to match whatever the incoming message was sent to (assuming you’ve set up your multiple email addresses as described here). A very pleasant surprise, as I was starting to wonder if I was going to have to switch back to Eudora.

Not yet sure if there is any way to make sigs automatically match the from address…
By Frank over 1 year later:

Anyone able to get this working in 3.2 on 10.5.2? What exactly do you enter in which of the fields? I only can get Jonathans way running. I tried the one Antonio uses to have names switched also but that doesn’t seem to work?
By Anthony over 1 year later:

Thanks! You are a genius!!!
By Hostile Fork over 1 year later:

This is good to know! But still doesn’t solve my fundamental problem of forgetting to change the address to the right one when composing new messages…

Apple Mail lets you pick a default, or just use the last viewed mailbox… but it doesn’t let you default to “None”. I would like to be forced to pick the appropriate address on each new message, because it’s easy to lose track when you’re looking in the unified inbox all the time.

Anyone else who’s ever sent mail from the wrong account want to join my petition??
By Mitch over 1 year later:

great tip works like a charm
By Simon over 1 year later:

I can’t get Antonio’s way to work?
By Shayne Power over 1 year later:

Had some trouble getting this to work. Whenever I added a new address, saved and then came back… it had gone.

Turns out that this “feature” is turned off if the account type is “.Mac IMAP”.

Funnily enough, it works fine when the account is set up as plain old IMAP. So I swapped over and everything is sweet.
By Dave Hughes over 1 year later:

Still getting Google hits, and still solving this problem for people. Thanks Jonathan!
By TQ over 1 year later:

this is aweome! thanks and i have it working perfectly now!
By blaus.wordpress.com over 1 year later:

thanks man!!! great tip I`ve been trying to find out how to make such thing… thanks again very much!
By Jerry Nilson over 1 year later:

This certainly does not work any more. /Jerry
By Jerry Nilson over 1 year later:

well, it works — one just have to try with addresses not already in the from-list …. oops.
By Troed over 1 year later:

Many thanks for this! Found you when googling for a solution to this very problem.
By Damian almost 2 years later:

Thank you sooo much! I would have never thought of this possibility to enter more than one email in that field… Super! :-)
By Steven almost 2 years later:

Antonio’s refinement was clever, though I have not found a way to make this work. I have now spent about a half an hour plugging in variations (including adding the data in the plist file) to no avail. I would use this tip ALL OVER my office if only I could change the name. Perhaps inspiration will strike soon…
By nargalzius almost 2 years later:

Is there a syntax for it to also have different sender names along with the addresses?

something like “Name Surname” <account1@email.com>, “alternate name” <account2@email.com>, etc.

Obviously I tried the one above and it doesn’t work, but I’m sure you get what I’m trying to say.

Any help would be appreciated.
By Jsmoove almost 2 years later:

i have this all setup and i’m able to select my Alias fine when sending an email. However when the recipient receives the email it is always from my original account and not the alias i selected to send from.
Now i thought this may be a google thing, but when i set up Thunderbird the recipient always receives the email from whomever i select to send as.

Can anyone help?
Kind Regards
By Vitorio almost 2 years later:

Thank you very much is exactly the answer that I’m searching for.
By Bob almost 2 years later:

You are awesome. Thank you for posting this.
By florenz almost 2 years later:

hi Jonathan,

as you are already using postfix:
http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#sender_dependent_relayhost_maps

you can tell postfix to choose different smarthosts… you just have to remember not to send mail from a “From” that would have to be delivered to an unreachable smarthost.

—
fl
By Paolo almost 2 years later:

Antonio just wanted to tantalise us!! :-(
By Dorus almost 2 years later:

Thanks for your post! I almost stopped using Mail.app because I couldn’t find this feature.
By Jennifer almost 2 years later:

Hello…I know this thread is old but it is addressing an issue I am really trying to resolve…I am using APPLE mail for my gmail account, which receives my hotmail emails…It all comes over nicely to apple mail, however, when i try to change the “from” field to reflect what email it actually comes from, that works but it ALSO shows my gmail…it reads “from Me@gmail.com on behalf of ME@msn.com” Is there a way to fix this??
By Jack almost 2 years later:

Brilliant tip! I’ve been scratching my head on this one since making the jump to IMAP. Thanks so much for sharing!
By Micah about 2 years later:

Wow, this just made my day and the rest of the year! Thank you and bookmarked on Delicious!
By JD about 2 years later:

Under 10.5’s Mail.app, you can sort of use Antonio’s trick if you leave the “real name” field empty…which is not much of a solution, but it’s something, I guess.
By drew about 2 years later:

A way to get Antonio’s method working by editing the plist can be found here:

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/member.php?s=4265445f8ed1c87e38601ab93cae4a5c&u=26400
By anthonyl about 2 years later:

I have a related problem

Apple Mail Wrong Proper Name for an email account, that is wrong Full name associated with an email addresses. I have on one computer login in Leopard Apple Mail around 10 email accounts about 1/2 mine and my wives.

For one of the accounts it seems her name is being associated with one of my email addresses despite it being correct in Mail setup and the Apple Address book. I even checked all the Apple Mail remembered cached recipients by typing in our names and removing them from recently sent recipients. This happened to be once before with a different account or two and I thought removing it from the Previous Addressees and adding it correctly to the Apple address book resolved.

It is sort of maddening that it does not simply follow what is in Apple Mail set up?? Anyone else ever see this?
By Henri-Pierre Robin about 2 years later:

Simply a warm THANK YOU from Belgium !
By Aaron about 2 years later:

For this to work in Gmail you have to also add the addresses in Settings > Accounts > “Send mail as”.

Thanks for the tip! I always thought this was impossible.
By BJL over 2 years later:

Shit that was easy, thanks!!
By S over 2 years later:

Thank you, thank you, thank you. So easy!
By spider over 2 years later:

Found this post through Google: thank you a lot! It worked perfectly!
By tonia over 2 years later:

wana kiss you… ;)
By Arjan over 2 years later:

Thx! your’re a genius!
By Anssi over 2 years later:

Brilliant, thanks for the tip! I just found this post via Google… I really prefer to use native tools, since especially Mozilla project’s stuff seems extra slow on Macs. Too bad there’s apparently no hope for Safari to match the functionality of Firefox + extensions. I must have adblock+, flashblock, customizegoogle, tab mix plus at the very least…
By Mikey over 2 years later:

Wow… How long did I spend trying to figure this out and it is something SOOOO simple. Thanks a lot, you made my day! If only google had thought to include this in their instructions (or if they did then they could have put it somewhere I could have found it)!

Thanks!!!
By Philippe over 2 years later:

Awesome!

Thanks a lot!
By Sebastian Buks over 2 years later:

WOW, finally! Thanks a lot. As usual a brilliant Apple way but not that obvious after all years stuck with M$
By דיני עבודה over 2 years later:

Thanks so much. Your post was very useful to me since it solved me a problem: I had multiple identities and I needed to aggregate those
multiple mail accounts into one single mail account.
By כלי דם over 2 years later:

I have to join all the previous praises, mate… That was a great solution. I feel like an idiot for not discovering it by myself.
By Kreig Zimmerman almost 3 years later:

Oh thank you! If only this was somehow documented better, a lot of headaches on my part would have been avoided… :)
By Cindy almost 3 years later:

Thanks!
By Atze almost 3 years later:

Hi,
great to know!

It stills shows 1 ‘full name’ for multiple email addresses.

How should I change the setup, so that I see different ‘full names’ for different email addresses.

I know just ‘delete’ the full name from the account setup, that works. However, it is not a nice solution.

Who can help?

Atze
By Andy H almost 3 years later:

Superb tip. Thank-you very much.
By ביטוח נסיעות לחו"ל about 3 years later:

What a great solution for a small but very annoying problem.
I also found it very problematic and frustrating, and I’m going to try out your solution right now, hope it will work well!
By Choucrouteman about 3 years later:

Internet is just great. 2 seconds and I found exactly what I was looking for.

Thank you Jonathan, I never thought there was such a simple solution :-)
By Emanuele about 3 years later:

Thanks for the tip!! ;-)
Bye,
Emanuele
By Chris Nehren about 3 years later:

Just what I needed, thank you.
By Mark Goodhand over 3 years later:

Excellent tip. Thanks very much.

Multiple identities in one account with Apple Mail.app

88 comments »

By George Razvan NICA 12 days later:

By Jamie Wilkinson 27 days later:

By Bart about 1 month later:

By Ted Houston 3 months later:

By Hank Hampel 3 months later:

By Dude 3 months later:

By Chris 3 months later:

By Thanks 3 months later:

By NOT solved the problem! 3 months later:

By Jonathan Tron 3 months later:

By that's no good idea... 4 months later:

By Jonathan Tron 4 months later:

By randy 5 months later:

By Jonathan Tron 5 months later:

By Jean 5 months later:

By Philipp 6 months later:

By Sophie G 6 months later:

By Jonathan Tron 6 months later:

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