How to add alias email address to Mailpile?

#1

I currently use Thunderbird (which is increasingly becoming a bane to use). One of the things I appreciate about the mail client is that Thunderbird has a setting called “Manage Identities” which allows me to create outgoing email addresses (alias email addresses that my email provider allows me to create, which help manage spam). Thunderbird’s “Manage Identities” section allows me to send email from my email client using these alias addresses.

How do I input my alias addresses for use in Mailpile? I want to send email in Mailpile using my alias addresses.

#2

Hello @tv0oz !

The way this is done, is to create a new “account” for the alias, with no Receiving Mail settings (leave the drop-down as None). The Sending Mail settings should be the same as for the main account.

#3

Just to add a voice here: something I really miss from Gmail is the setting to default to ‘reply from delivered to’ address.

So the account would be my domain, or it could be @gmail.com say (or another provider that supports +appending-to-alias), and then within that you might set some pre-defined aliases that you compose new mail from often, and might also enable replying from the delivery address.

Like many people I ‘create’ aliases frequently, whenever I sign up for some new service - if I hadn’t OAuth’d with GitHub here it would’ve included a folder to route it to, and ‘mailpile’ - but sometimes it’s important to reply from them, not from my default alias, e.g. customer support tickets that only route my reply correctly if it’s from the address it expects.

It’s just a hassle to have to dive into settings to add an alias in this case. (In Fastmail, I found this thread while looking into whether Mailpile would solve that problem.)

Is the way ‘accounts’ work fairly set in stone, design-wise? Or is there much chance it might change sufficiently to support this sort of use?

#4

FWIW, Mailpile absolutely tries to reply from the address that was sent to - but it’s not currently smart enough to know that foo@gmail.com and foo+bar@gmail.com are for all intents and purposes the same address.

This is valuable feedback, Mailpile does not well support people who receive and send mail from a very large number of different addresses, let alone an infinite “dynamic” pool of addresses as enabled by the plussed address convention. I agree it would be cool if Mailpile did better here, but without thinking it over I’m reluctant to make any promises or guess how hard it would be. I’ll think about it!

#5

Another solution could be using an external email alias service. I recommend SimpleLogin (disclaimer: I’m its developer) which is open source & self-hostable.