Setting an alias as default...

41

And that is just a stupid comment!

42

So far so good, then.

43

I don’t think that you have to be childish about this Scott. Gary has explained further up how to setup a default account, and yet you persist in wanting to use an alias as a default account. I agree that if you are finding yourself having to constantly change the sending address, then you are doing something wrong. Maybe grab a coffee and rethink how you use your email client. If there is a way to make it easier for your daily use, why not accept that and use it as it was intended. Misusing a feature is not a crime, but why get so passionate about changing something that is not meant to be used in the way you think it should?

44

I’m not passionate about it, I actually don’t care all that much - like I said, it’s just a minor UI tweak. I just don’t get why Gary is so passionate about enforcing how I use aliases.

The technical, historical, or personal preference reasons why my email alias happens to be the one I use most often when composing a new email aren’t really anyone else’s business. Given that it is, though, a checkbox somewhere in the client that would make my life a tiny bit easier.

Setting up a new email account and therefore changing my address with thousands of contacts and websites seems like an extreme ask for someone who’s asking to save a couple clicks. Ditto telling me to stop using the email client I liked enough to pay for.

Granted it’s extremely unlikely to happen, and that’s no big deal. But if it did happen, anyone who it wouldn’t help doesn’t have to check the option. Why is that a source of such outrage? Telling people asking for a minor UI tweak to “Get over it already” and calling the request stupid seems like a huge over-reaction to something that wouldn’t affect Gary at all.

45

I think you made it our business by discussing the subject in an open forum. :wink:

If you are trying to use a feature in a way it was not intended, and there is a simple solution using the application as it was designed, why not look into that? It would save everyone a lot of bother. There is no need to change your email address with thousands of contacts or websites. You are sending from the alias address already, and having to manually select it every time, so why not setup an account with that address and set it as default. The receiver of the message will get the email from that address, which they are doing now anyway. The only difference is that you will not have to manually change it every time. 

46

Scott, I’m with you. I’ve been following this thread for years just never had a reason to chime in until now. Literally every other program I use (Outlook, Gmail, Edison Mail etc.) all have this option. Since EM already has the drop down box with all my emails listed giving the option to choose what should be the default is probably just an oversight. My reasons for wanting it are irrelevant to the forum and will simply be pounced upon by the naysayers. I’ll continue to use a different program so no harm no foul. Just wanted to let you know that there are more of us out here like you who would love to have this simple, common feature be implemented. After all, the big boys (Google and Microsoft) see enough of a benefit to it and have implemented it. EM will come around one day. Keep fighting the good fight!

47

Well I never. What a commotion! I thought I’d chip because I’m an erstwhile contributor to this thread having wanted the option that Scott is requesting since I started using emClient nearly a year ago. And anyway, Gary, could you let me know if you work for emClient? I’m not sure if we’re getting some sort of authoritative response here. Otherwise I’m not sure why this is exercising you so?

So to my point. I want to use my alias 100% of the time! And no, I’m not being a total plonker! I have my own domain set up for the simple reason that I can use it for email redirection (and I don’t have to use my gmail address). I can’t use this email address to set up an account in emClient because there is no email server handling mail to this address. I simply want my emails to appear to come from this address and for replies to go that address. It works absolutely rinky dink if I select the alias in emClient.

So Gary, I’m afraid I don’t know why you’re getting so upset. Just accept that there are several users who can see the need for Scott’s request (not just the 2 you seem to know about), stop worrying about all sorts of technical gumph and let someone from emClient respond as to why this genuinely very simple request hasn’t made it to the development phase.

And a Happy New Year to you all.

48

I wasn’t planning on commenting again, since I already said what I had to say, but it seems Gary and Brian must not have been paying attention:

THERE ARE CASES WHERE eM Client’s “DEFAULT ACCOUNT” FEATURE CAN’T DO WHAT YOU REQUIRE, AND YOU NEED TO USE AN ALIAS AND/OR SWITCH SENDER ACCOUNTS ON MOST OF THE EMAILS YOU SEND.
I already gave one specific example case, as it applies to me:  Routing ALL outgoing mail via one server, while using a (different) Exchange server account as your main inbox.  I’m sure there are others, though.  Telling users to use the program “as intended” is not helpful, and frankly rude, when they’ve already explained how and why existing functionality can NOT meet their needs.  (I also find it ironic that Gary is lambasting others for trying to “misuse” the alias feature, while his proposed solution to me was essentially an egregious misuse of the account setup settings…)

49

As I said before, that is NOT a misuse of the account settings. There is no standard that says the login name has to be the same as the email address. In fact, in RFC 3501, which is the standards for the IMAP protocol, they use a name and not an email address in the example for login protocol.

But as an Exchange user you should know that because in most email clients, the Exchange account does not use the email address, but the user name, for login.

For convenience, many IMAP and POP3 servers adopt the email address as the username. But again, that is not required.

50

Another option is to run your own email server where you can rewrite the headers to whatever you want when sending or receiving emails from any of your email addresses.
hMailServer(it’s free) would do this for you if you can program a little VBScript.
You would of course need to leave your PC on 24/7/365 and require your own domain and a static IP number but all of these are simple to achieve.
This is what I did because I was fed up with lack of flexibility when using paid for web hosting and email accounts. And then you can create as many email addresses as you like with as many aliases as you like.
You might also learn that email is a little more complex than you seem to think it is. What you consider to be a 5 minute fix is very far from the truth if currently what goes into the From: header is used as the actual sending address.

51

Again, we’re already satisfied with how em client handles headers. The feature you’re trying to find a way to implement already exists. When composing an email we just pick the address we want from the pull-down menu, and em client handles the rest. I’m sure it is all very complex under the covers, but it’s already done.

All we’re asking for is a way to pick which address shows up in that pulldown by default. Paying for a separate email account or setting up my own mail server to save two clicks per email would be insane overkill.

52

Dear Scott,

Perhaps you and I should form an exasperation society!

Richard

53

Rob, you can also use hMail’s external accounts settings for collecting messages from the server. There is a similar option for outgoing messages, but I can’t recall it now. It is a lot more complicated though.

Scott, please understand something.

“All we’re asking for is a way to pick which address shows up in that pulldown by default. Paying for a separate email account or setting up my own mail server to save two clicks per email would be insane overkill.”

There is a way to pick which address is listed by default. Under normal circumstances it is the default email account. You can change that by making another email account the default. Unfortunately an alias is NOT an email account so cannot be set as the default. The conditions of the application code do not permit an alias or an SMTP-only account to be set as default. It is just not possible under the hood as you put it. If you have more than one email account, and are in a folder other than the default account, it will choose that address as default. That is how the application is designed to work.

You don’t need to pay for a separate email account or setup your own email server, though I love Rob’s solution for the more do-it-yourself approach. :wink: If you are already using an alias by manual selection, then the simple solution is given above in one of my comments. It will take you a few minutes to implement initially, and thereafter save you a second and those two clicks every time you compose a new message.

54

@Gary Curtin I had to register at the forum after reading your rude replies in this thread. Stop calling other people stupid, only because they have other requirements and workflows than yours! You don’t understand the concept of good user experience at all. If there is an option of choosing something from a list ANYWAY, then why make a problem of defaulting the choice by users? What’s the difference between defaulting any other attribute of new email, like signature or font size, and defaulting “FROM”? What technical obstacle exactly must be solved to save a default choice here and help users changing this compulsively every time by hand? Gmail can do this. Outlook can do this. Even old Opera M2 could do this.

It’s a shame that this request is open for so many years, especially being so trivial to implement. The only reason for this that comes to my mind is that people selling email client for power users are casual users themselves and don’t really understand their customer needs beyond a simple world of single private account & single work account.

To give you the simplest and perhaps the most common use case for this - imagine a custom business domain handled by Gmail servers. In such case every email should be sent on behalf of [email protected] and not [email protected]:

  1. Manual Gmail configuration with [email protected] is possible, but it limits eM Client to SMTP/IMAP only, where the main strength of using Gmail as a provider is in its calendars, contacts, todos, chats and so.

  2. Splitting this into two separate accounts (one for custom domain SMTP/IMAP and one for Google services synchronization) seems a funny overkill for me as this could be already solved by simply defaulting the infamous alias. Also, the whole point of using software like eM Client is to hide such technical details from me. I want to reduce number of entities and merge accounts, not duplicate! What if I need 3 Gmail accounts with custom domain each? Creating 6 separate accounts in eM Client is your “clean solution” for this meant to simplify my workflow?

3) No matter what you think about these “right” approaches they will stop working soon anyway. Both of them require providing passwords directly to authenticate and Google wants to ban access for non-OAuth login methods starting from 2021.

55

The technical obstacle that needs to be solved is that the application requires an account to have both a sending and receiving protocol be made a default.

Aliases don’t have receiving protocols, so they cannot be made a default.

56

So that is why. Makes sense.

57

Garry J. Not sure why you need to split this into two accounts. Simply add [email protected] to eM Client and have your email, calendar and contacts all from your Gsuite account.

58

No, it doesn’t make sense at all. You keep repeating that we cannot set a default alias, because aliases don’t support RECEIVING protocols… but all we ask is to set a default alias visible in the New Message window. NEW MESSAGE means SENDING. How is that related to receiving? I don’t care about receiving protocols and forwarding messages, because it’s done by email servers beyond capabilities of a desktop email client anyway.

The fact that the application developed by you “requires something” is a problem with human reluctance to implement the change, not a real technical obstacle related to protocols, standards or 3rd parties. I think that you just want the problem to be a problem.

59

Yeah, unfortunately Garry, that is the limitation of the application. In order to set the address as the default, the application requires it have both a sending and receiving protocol. 

I keep repeating that because nobody seems to get it. Yes it would be nice to set your alias as a default address, but because it does not have a receiving protocol, you can’t. The application doesn’t take into account if you care or not. It simply has it’s instructions, and follows them.
 
Oh, and by the way, this is a user supported forum. Those commenting here are just users like you. The application is not devolved by us, we just use it.

60

Actually, there is a hack to do so with a little inconvinient:

  1. Configure your email alias.
  2. Go to account > Default Email > email and change it to the alias you want it to be the default.

You are done! now in the emails select will appear 2 emails, your alias and the default email which by the way is now the alias youve changed. If you want to send from the original domain you must change again in your account config thogh. Hope it works for you!

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