Handling “send from” account problem in Thunderbird

This article is going to provide a solution for outgoing mailing identity selection in Thunderbird.

Thunderbird is one of the widely used email client that is open source and free, I use it to help me work on my emails. I have an issue of how to reply to an email that should use another account.

Suppose I have an email account A, where all incoming emails to my other account B will be redirected to account A automatically. When in Thunderbird, the emails sent to account B are in account A because of the redirection mechanism.

However, when I try to reply an email in account A, my reply address is actually account A because Thunderbird considers the message is in account A and the reply from email should be account A, where I really want to use account B to reply since it is sent to account B. Previously I had to manually change that from address to account B but I could not endure that further. I went to google and actually found the solution. You could have a look at this page and see all the details on setting you own identity for each account.

So for account A, we could go to account settings in Thunderbird, in the bottom of settings, there’s a manage identities button, when you click on that, you will be able to create a new identity, this is able to allow you to add the info from account B so that we replying the email, the identify of account B will be used instead of account A, and that message would be directed stored on account A’s sent mail mailbox. You could also set Reply from this identity when delivery headers match certain domain so that it would warn you if you reply to emails that are not in the predefined domain.

This is just a simple feature that I was not able to figure out previously even though I tried to find a solution by manually checking all the settings.