Managing email aliases in Apple Mail
In a recent tech note, Apple explains how to organize things if you have multiple email “aliases” all pointing back to one central account. There’s no need to set up an account for each one with all the profusion of mailboxes that causes in the mailbox drawer. Apple Mail knows a smarter way.
Instead,
1. Go the Accounts tab in Apple Mail’s Preferences
2. Select the master account (the one to which the aliases point)
3. Enter all the email aliases into the “Email Address” field, one after another, separated by commas. Like this -
4. Save the changes.
5. Apple Mail will now collect all the email to any of those addresses and put it in a single inbox.
When you are composing, the aliases are available from the drop-down “Account” box. When replying, Apple Mail is smart enough to auto-select the alias to which the original was addresses and to reply from that same alias.
You might think it is confusing to have all the emails from these different addresses jumbled up in the same inbox, but I doesn’t bother me. I could use Smart Mailboxes for each alias to separate them out, but I find that a rule setting a colour for messages to each alias is enough.
Apple has other helpful tech notes for Mail.app users.
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November 13th, 2005 at 7:36 pm
Thanks for the great tip. However, I have tried to reply to a message that was sent to a certain alias, but the “From” address of that message was not automatically changed to the address from the original message.
Are you sure that this is supposed to work?
November 13th, 2005 at 7:44 pm
I am positive that this is supposed to work! It works flawlessly for me.
You can take it from the horse’s mouth.
December 20th, 2005 at 8:35 am
[...] Adding these “aliases” is easy. [...]
January 26th, 2006 at 12:33 am
[...] Mail.app doesn’t allow you to specify a particular sig for each email address alias associated with the one account. (Find out how to run multiple email addresses from one account in Mail). [...]
March 25th, 2007 at 2:44 am
I also need to change the from name for each email address, is this possible?
December 13th, 2007 at 4:47 am
is it just me or has leopard mail.app lost the intelligence mentioned in this post to auto-select the correct alias to set the reply from? i could swear this used to work properly in tiger, but having upgraded to leopard, it is definitely not working for me now. no matter what alias a message is addressed to, when i click reply, the from address is set to my default, main address. this is a really bad flaw.
February 19th, 2009 at 4:03 am
when i enter the 2 aliases with a comma it doesnt accept it-
and i cant receive any mails at all because it always says the password for “name.name@gmx.at, alias@gmx.at” is wrong.
so it seems to think it is one email adress instead of two.
:-((((