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MurrayM

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#161749 18-Jan-2015 15:39
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I'm trying to help my father with an email problem he has.  He's using Outlook 2010 and has several email addresses set up, using a couple of different domain names that he owns, all going into the one mailbox at his website host.

In his Outlook he has an account and a folder set up for each address, and has rules set up to put incoming messages into the correct folder.

When he goes to send a message from any of his email addresses Outlook puts in the correct address in the From field, so this works ok.

When he goes to reply to a message he runs into problems.  On two of the addresses Outlook puts in the correct From address.  On the other two addresses Outlook puts in the wrong From address.

I'm not used to how Outlook works, I use Thunderbird myself, and so I'm struggling to find where in Outlook you set up which address to use in the From field when replying to a message.  I've gone into the settings for each account and for the life of me I can't find anywhere to set up a From address.  On the very first page of the account settings there's an Email Address field, and all accounts are set up with the correct email address here.  There's a Reply-To address field, but all accounts have this empty.  I can't find any other fields in the account where an email address can be put in.

Where do I set up the From address for an account?  In Thunderbird I'm used to using Identities, but I can't find anything like this in Outlook.

When replying he can click on the From button next to the From address and select the correct one, but we should be able to get Outlook to set it automatically.

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TLD

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  #1217002 18-Jan-2015 16:41
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Are these addresses a mixture of xtra pop3, Gmail, and hotmail?   If so, which is giving the problem?  I'm guess the standard POP3 is working OK.

What I'm wondering is if the reply to field is a function of the way gmail or whatever, works with Outlook.  I only have Office 2013 on this system, but I think my wife has 2010 _and_ she has both Gmail and Hotmail accounts linked to it.  If you give some more info, I'll have a look (but I do have to go sort out tea for when my SO gets home from work :-( )




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chevrolux
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  #1217008 18-Jan-2015 16:57
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When you reply in Outlook in the messgae composer the 'From' address should be a drop down box if you have multiple accounts on Outlook. So before you send you just select which account to send from. I think by default it should just pick whatever the original email was sent to. I'm not sure how you expect Outlook to decide automatically otherwise?.

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  #1217009 18-Jan-2015 17:03
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My father does use Xtra as his ISP, but all of these accounts are for emails addresses that have nothing to do with Xtra.  He has three domain names for different businesses and all domain names are hosted by one web hosting company (iServe).  All the incoming mail feeds into just one mailbox and he's receiving email just fine.

No Gmail or Hotmail.

He has set up all the email addresses within Xtra / Yahoo Mail to allow sending from them.  Sending works fine, it's just getting Outlook to default the From address to the correct address when he's replying to a message (creating new messages works fine, Outlook seems to look at the account that is currently selected and uses the email address for that).

I'm pretty sure this is an Outlook problem, he's seeing the wrong email address in the From field when he replies to a message (this is all within Outlook, before he even sends the message).  He is able to choose the correct email address by clicking on the From button and then selecting the email address he wants to send from, and it will be sent correctly after that.  But since he somehow managed to get two of the accounts to work properly, it should be possible to get the other two to also use the correct From address.



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  #1217014 18-Jan-2015 17:11
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chevrolux: When you reply in Outlook in the messgae composer the 'From' address should be a drop down box if you have multiple accounts on Outlook. So before you send you just select which account to send from. I think by default it should just pick whatever the original email was sent to. I'm not sure how you expect Outlook to decide automatically otherwise?.


Yes, if you click on the button next to the From address you can select which email address to use, however two of his accounts seem to automatically select the correct email address to use as the From address when replying to a message, and the other two accounts don't select the correct From address.

Since there doesn't seem to be anywhere to set up the From address for an account, it would make sense that Outlook would default the From address to the To address when replying.  But this doesn't seem to happen for two of his accounts.

Imagine that he has four accounts: dave@email1.com, fred@email1.com, dave@email2.com and fred@email2.com

All incoming messages are sent to the correct account's inbox using rules that have been set up.

When we try to reply to anything sent to dave@email1.com or fred@email1.com the From address is automatically set by Outlook to dave@email1.com or fred@email1.com

But when we try to reply to a message sent to dave@email2.com Outlook sets the From address to dave@email1.com and when we try to reply to a message sent to fred@email2.com Outlook sets the From address to dave@email1.com 



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  #1217037 18-Jan-2015 18:15
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You say they are coming into one mailbox; is this at the host end, or in Outlook? If they are at the email host end in one box, then Outlook will see this as one account.




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  #1217162 18-Jan-2015 21:58
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coffeebaron: You say they are coming into one mailbox; is this at the host end, or in Outlook? If they are at the email host end in one box, then Outlook will see this as one account.

The one mailbox is at the host end.

So you can't do what I'm trying to do in Outlook?  Thunderbird handles things like this quite happily.  And Outlook does get two of the four accounts correct.

I guess I could try creating multiple mailboxes on the host and see if that makes any difference at all.

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  #1217239 19-Jan-2015 00:00
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Outlook will store a note next to each message containing which "account" was used to download the message from the server.
When you reply, it will automatically use that account ("from address" dropdown just lists accounts and it uses the one specified within that account)

So the solution is to stop all those domains from forwarding to the one mailbox, and to have seperate mailboxes for each email address. Create accounts in outlook to download the mail from each of those mailboxes.

When you reply, it will then use the correct account (same as used to download message originally) to send the message.

Thunderbird i think creates an inbox for each seperate account - its behaviour is very similar to outlook, except outlook can combine inboxes, or seperate them like thunderbird does. You have gone the long way where outlook combines the inbox, and then rules are used to break them apart again.

Use seperate accounts for seperate inboxes just like thunderbird and all will be well.
I cant tell you how many times I have had to create forwarding trees trying to diagnose where email is getting lost as I have a few customers with about 10 domains and incoming mail hopping from one to another, to another under bad advice from lazy technicians who just think "oh we'll just forward it all" without creating a proper plan.




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MurrayM

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  #1217289 19-Jan-2015 08:35
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Thanks Ray, that makes sense!

I can easily set up multiple mailboxes, one for each account, so I'll go down that route.

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  #1217317 19-Jan-2015 09:28
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Also be aware that "from" is a display field only. It's not the field that mail clients use to send a reply. The solution above is likely to correctly populate the actual fields properly.

MurrayM

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  #1217512 19-Jan-2015 12:17
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Rays suggestion worked, with multiple mailboxes.

Thanks everyone.

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  #1217753 19-Jan-2015 17:39
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In Outlook, if one opens a message,  on the ribbon there is a menu "Message", select this and there will be two options BCC and FROM.  If you select from, it will replace the default 'From' field in the email to a dropdown that allows one to select which account you can use to send the email.  In this dropdown there is the option to specify other email addresses.

Note that (and from memory) it is [often] the SMTP server that email is sent through that sets the from/reply-to field.  So if the reply was sent from 'dave' but send it through the 'fred' account, the person who gets the email will see it as sent from 'fred'. Sometimes  there may get a 'on behalf of' message used - eg. from fred on behalf of dave.

I think that using separate accounts will mean that the responding email is sent through the correct SMTP server.







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MurrayM

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  #1217794 19-Jan-2015 18:50
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TwoSeven: I think that using separate accounts will mean that the responding email is sent through the correct SMTP server.

All outgoing mail is going through Xtra's SMTP server, and I've logged into the Xtra / Yahoo webmail and set up and verified all four email addresses as being allowed to send from.

Everything is working ok now (apart from one little niggle that is annoying but not a show-stopper, I'll start a new thread in the Spark forum to discuss that).

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  #1217881 19-Jan-2015 21:15
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MurrayM:
TwoSeven: I think that using separate accounts will mean that the responding email is sent through the correct SMTP server.

All outgoing mail is going through Xtra's SMTP server, and I've logged into the Xtra / Yahoo webmail and set up and verified all four email addresses as being allowed to send from.

Everything is working ok now (apart from one little niggle that is annoying but not a show-stopper, I'll start a new thread in the Spark forum to discuss that).

Why through Xtra SMTP? That's just bad setup. Email should authenticate out through your email host. If your email host can't support outgoing SSL/TLS SMTP auth, then change your host provider.





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  #1217953 19-Jan-2015 23:30
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coffeebaron: Why through Xtra SMTP? That's just bad setup. Email should authenticate out through your email host. If your email host can't support outgoing SSL/TLS SMTP auth, then change your host provider.

Don't worry, things are in hand to change that.

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  #1218467 20-Jan-2015 17:53
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MurrayM:
TwoSeven: I think that using separate accounts will mean that the responding email is sent through the correct SMTP server.

All outgoing mail is going through Xtra's SMTP server, and I've logged into the Xtra / Yahoo webmail and set up and verified all four email addresses as being allowed to send from.

Everything is working ok now (apart from one little niggle that is annoying but not a show-stopper, I'll start a new thread in the Spark forum to discuss that).


Sorry, when I said SMTP Server, I actually meant account on SMTP Server,  so it can be the same address, but you will need different accounts (its the account info that is written into the from field in the email as it is processed).





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