Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'What I want' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
What I want
Authored by: SOX on Dec 19, '05 09:41:35AM

What I want is a way to have an mail.app email account that is send-only and does not try to collect e-mail.

Most of my e-mail accounts for different URLs I own have forwarding set up to sent the e-mails to my personal ISP. This way I don't have to have POP access to all those domin names. This works great for getting my e-mail. But when I send e-mail I often want to send it with different reply-to addresses according to which Domina names the message is supposed to be in regard to.

I can;t figure out how to create reply-to addresses (in the pull-down and not hand enetered) without creating an account. But if I create an account mail.app insists I give it an incoming mail POP address which I don't have. If I place a fake one there it simply stalls the mail.app program when I collect mail. And If I place a real one there it downloads from the same POP address multiple times.



[ Reply to This | # ]
What you should try
Authored by: moritzh on Dec 19, '05 10:16:15AM

Here is what I do:
- Create a new account with the desired "real name" and e-mail address that I want to use for sending e-mails.
- Use type POP for the account. In the incoming mail server field, enter bogus information. I use a somewhat meaningful name that deliberately contains illegal characters to remind me of the purpose of the account. E.g. as host name I use "[dummy]myISP.ch" and as user name I use my real user name "moritzh", then the folder created by Mail.app in LIbrary/Mail will be named "moritzh@[dummy]myISP.ch".
- In the advanced section, use the following:
Put a check mark in front of "Enable this account".
Remove the check mark in front of "Include when automatically checking for new mail".
That way the account is never queried automatically, and I don't do it manually for that account, so I don't get any errors about the bogus host name. I can use the e-mail address for sending e-mails, and the sent e-mails are evenly neatly ordered in a separate folder because it's a separate account within Mail.app.
You are talking about "Reply-To:". YOu could of course also use that (send from your normal address but set the "Reply-To:" header to the address you want to get replies to), but I think it's way better to also use the address for sending.



[ Reply to This | # ]
An even easier way
Authored by: mike3k on Dec 19, '05 11:09:52AM

When you create an email account, enter a list of addresses separated by commas as the return address, for example:

myname@domain1.com,anothername@domain1.com,myname@domain2.com

All of those addresses will appear in the return address menu even though you only created a single account.



[ Reply to This | # ]
An even easier way
Authored by: SOX on Dec 19, '05 11:34:48AM

THe issue is separating the outbound and inbound function.
When I move around I have different ISPs. Sometimes I can't even use one of the ISPs because for example, it's web-mail only (not POP) or the building I'm in blocks downloads on port 110. I'd still like to be able to compose an e-mail with an given reply-to address regardless of the accessibility of inbound mail.



[ Reply to This | # ]
An even easier way
Authored by: xSmurf on Dec 19, '05 05:14:39PM

Maybe you could use ssh to tunnel port 110?
I do that a lot, my school blocks everything except 80 8080 and 443. I already use 80 and 8080 (well I'd used 443 but it's not as important) so I run ssh on port 443. This also has the advantage that 443 (SSL) is normally encrypted and so is SSH making it a bit more difficult for the sysadmins to figure me out... been running like this for the past semester with no problems. But maybe you wanna check with your IT guy first (else you decided to put a prank on him and replace his coffee sugar with salt last 1st of April ;o)

Check around, there are a gazilion hints for tunneling.

---
SnitchCTL : http://snitchctl.smurfturf.net/

PM G4 DP 800 / 1.25gb / 120Gb+80Gb / CD/DVD±RW/RAM/DL
- The only APP Smurf



[ Reply to This | # ]
incoming/outgoing account distinction
Authored by: sjk on Dec 19, '05 08:49:09PM

Re: THe issue is separating the outbound and inbound function.

I wish more mail apps supported distinct outgoing (SMTP) and incoming (IMAP, POP) accounts. In Mulberry, any mail address you use is associated with an identity and each identity uses a SMTP account, normally an inherited default.

Incoming IMAP or POP accounts really aren't necessary if all you want is outgoing (SMTP) functionality, but unfortunately most mail apps don't separate them like Mulberry so you end creating "dummy" accounts as a sloppy workaround for those oversimplistic implementations.



[ Reply to This | # ]
An even easier way
Authored by: davidduff on Jun 07, '06 10:15:56AM

mike3k's point is a good one. i went a while using mail.app before i eventually stumbled across this.

mail has some subtle features and generally does not map cleanly to how other common mail programs work. it can be deceptive because on the surface, it appears very simple, but there's actually a good bit of complexity behind the scenes.

what's cool:

if you have multiple accounts which forward into a single account, you can just have one account setup with multiple mail addresses attached to it and you can still send mail from those addresses (w/o needing to set up "send-only" accounts) -- this was the thrust of mike3k's post.

what's a bit less cool:

it's not easy to get mail to use different smtp servers to send a message -- i.e. if you need to use a different server under different conditions. so you need to work hard to find a server that you can use from everywhere (i.e. one that supports ssl and authentication).

(afaik) even if you authenticate, you can't send mail from your .mac account unless you use <user>@mac.com as the from address, which pretty much eliminates it as a candidate for the aforementioned smtp server. this is an annoying limitation and a stupid one, as far as i am concerned.

the signature management stuff got more powerful with the tiger release, however it now appears that you can set a default signature to use for a sending account. nice, but what if you have multiple addresses attached to an account as described above? there would appear to be no way of setting signature based on the from address (which seems to be what you would want to do most of the time). or am i missing something there?



[ Reply to This | # ]