How to Change Identity While Sending an Email in Thunderbird, So as to Choose the “From” Address That You Want!
What does it mean change identity?
Have you ever wanted to send an email or reply to an email with a different name or personality, while using the same email account (outgoing server)? It helps you set a professional habit of emailing where you want to be sending emails and reply to emails with a different identity. Thankfully, Mozilla Thunderbird has the feature of setting up these “identities” that you can select before seeing the emails.
Let’s find out more about identities, what they mean, and how to use them.
The first thing to understand is that setting up an identity doesn’t require a different email account or an outgoing server. Although, you can also edit any identity to have any outgoing server, signature, sent folder, and so on. The only thing necessary for this to work is that your outgoing SMTP server allows sending mails that have different name inside the “from” field. Some ISP or hosts restricts sending emails that do not match with the “from” domain in their server.
Why Do You Need It?
The most useful and at times, incredibly productive, use of this feature is that it lets you choose what the readers/recipients of your emails see as coming from.
Consider this simple example:
A business owner receives a few emails to the domain ‘[email protected]’ about the customers having a complaint about the services or products. But what if he does not want to reply to those messages with the same ‘identity’ as ‘complaint?’ Many business owners like to respond to complaints as “support” or with other names. This can be easily be set in the “identities” section of Thunderbird.
How to Change Identity While Sending an Email in Thunderbird
So, here’s how to do it:
- Go to ‘Tools’ ⇒ ‘Account Settings’.
- Select the Account you want to set identities for and then click on “Manage Identities” at the bottom.
- Click ‘Add’ and specify the necessary information for the new identity.
Now anytime you write a new email or reply to an email, you can select this identity from the “from” drop-down menu.
One of the more important and much useful features is to set the “reply to” option. This means whenever the reader of your email replies, it automatically gets sent to whichever email address you specify here.
For example, you can choose to send an email as any identity. But the replies to that email can be received wherever you want, even to another account.
You can even set many other options associated with the identities, like signature, security (digital signature and encryption), email text format, folders to save those emails, and more.
As said above, there are exceptions where identities may not work, depending on the emailing server/service that you are using. For example, Gmail will ignore the different ‘from’ address if you haven’t linked other accounts with your Gmail primary one. You can go to Gmail’s settings and add another email address that you want to use in the “identities.”