Hi jarod5001,
There are separate issues involved:
- multiple domains: your one mail server can accommodate more than one domain
- multiple mailboxes: mail for multiple addresses (the same or different domains) can get delivered to the same mailbox, or to different mailboxes
- multiple identities: your mail client (Thunderbird in this case, and most clients as well) supports multiple accounts and multiple ‘identities’ : a combination of a from-mail-address and a sending account to be used, optionally triggered by replying to mail sent to that confiured from-address
You can mix and match to get the desired result internally, with your mail contacts not knowing which option you chose.
Scenario 1
- One Yuno-account / mailbox, multiple aliases, multiple identities
- In this case, you’d add an address from your @work.com-domain as mail alias to your regular user account.
- All mail to jarod@personal and all mail to jarod@work go to the same mailbox
- Your mail client opens the mailbox, and fetches all mail, whether it is addressed to jarod@personal or jarod@work
- Using sieve-filters you could have the mail routed to different folders in the mailbox
- When replying to mail, Thunderbird will use the default identity if there is only one.
- add an identity per mail alias as described on the Mozilla site
- Thunderbird will use that identity when replying to an email sent to that alias
This way, all mail will end up mixed in one user account. That can be a disadvantage when isolating things, or an advantage when searching with mail clients that can only do per-account searches.
Scenario 2
- Multiple Yuno-accounts / mailboxes (one per address), optional aliases, multiple identities
- In this case, you’d create a new user that uses an address from your @work.com-domain
- All mail to jarod@personal goes to one mailbox, and all mail to jarod@work go to another mailbox
- Your mail client fetches mail from those mailboxes seperately, and displays it in either the jarod@personal or the jarod@work account tree.
- Each account will have its own “Inbox”, “Sent items” folder, and so on
- Still, when replying to mail, Thunderbird will use the default identity if there is only one.
- add an identity per mail alias as described on the Mozilla site
- In this case, also pay attention to the account used for sending the email
- Thunderbird will use that identity when replying to an email sent to that alias
This way, the mail will end up in the specific user account to which the email was sent. In line with the previous scenario, but turned 180 degrees: that can be an advantage when isolating things, or a disadvantage when searching with mail clients that can only do per-account searches.
Current situation
From reading your message, I think your situation resembles scenario 2 most closely. In either case, identities are the way to go to manage sending mail to disparate groups of contacts.
As an aside: most mail clients talk of “Identities”; Thunderbird does, KMail does, K9 (Android) does, and webclients such as Roundcube and Snappymail also talk of identities.
After my question above, about the note field, I picked up using Cypth; there it’s called “Profiles”. On request they added a note field to the profile, to keep track what you intended to use that profile for.
As a heads-up: the resulting headers seem to differ a bit from client to client. Often it is something as “Sent by //account// on behalf of //identity//”, As long as recipients just click ‘reply’ in their mail client, you’ll receive their reply on the address that you configured under ‘reply-to’ for that identity, but if they read the headers, they could manually reply to the actual sending account, in stead of only to the alias that you configured for the identity.
Give it a go, and good luck!
