Enhanced email alias support

Hi,

Having just left an organisation where I was able to use exchange server with my iPhone, I have now switched to using Gmail to give me essentially the same experience; synchronized email, calendar and contacts across PC and phone. I had been using Outlook on the PC and found its support for IMAP pretty frustrating when compared to its exchange support, so I have switched to using eM client. So the first thing I’d like to say is what a fine Outlook replacement it is. Nice job!

Now to my idea, or feature request really :slight_smile: I have always used aliases for my emails to differentiate the kinds of emails I get. I have one I use on shopping sites, one for all contacts, one for close friends, one for domain admin, etc etc. The combination of Gmail’s and eM Client’s support for aliases is great and allows be to send and receive emails and maintain my “email identities” across all my conversations. All good.

The only irritation in eM Client is that I must manually select the “from address” for every email I send. In addition, “reply to all” does not remove the alias from the “to address list”, so that also needs to be done manually. This seems unecessary when I am replying to emails sent to a particular alias. Please would you consider enhancing eM Client’s alias support to overcome these irritations?

It would seem relatively trivial to iterate over the list of aliases for a particular account and pattern match the one that the email was actually sent to, and use that to pre-populate the “from address” in the reply, and also remove that entry from the “to address list” when “reply to all” was used.

One thing to consider if you elected to implement this is that I have “discovered” an undocumented feature: aliases in the form “[email protected] (My Name)” properly disseminate the friendly name to Gmail (which also honours their use), which is great since it means friendly names are supported all the way to the recipient. However, that feature would need to be considered when pattern matching on the list of aliases (the regular expression would need to check that the start of the string matched, not the entire string).

Thanks for taking the time to read my idea; I hope enough people see the value in it to persuade you to implement it. It is a brilliant idea, and I won’t even charge you for it! :wink:

Best regards,

Richard