So, for a while now I have been frustrated with Thunderbird’s (and every other email client’s) handling of replying from a secondary email account, and the client not choosing your primary email as the send from address. For example…at work we all have two email accounts. One that is public, and on our business cards, and that we use to communicate with clients and the outside world, and one that is internal and used only for backup purposes of the primary/public email account. To make this tangible, let’s say my public account is “con...@domain.com” and my internal one is “conn...@domain.com”. Well, we host all our own email and the backup email account is on a different server (which has a lower CPU tax rate, and less likely to fail) than the primary email server, so we just move stuff over from the primary (external) email to the secondary (internal) email every week or so, so that if our primary server goes down then we have not lost more than a week or so, at max of email communiques.
Now, with that knowledge, sometimes we have to reply to an email that we have already moved from the primary email Inbox over to the backup email’s Inbox. So, when I select the option to “Reply” or “Reply All” (usually), to an email that I have already backed up, the new message window shows that the email will be coming from “conn...@domain.com”. I have the manually change the drop-down selection to my main account every single time I reply to an already backed-up email. This would normally be a minor inconvenience, but my primary email account has a signature image/text attachment, so when I select that email account from the drop down, it auto adds that signature to my reply, and it always puts it at the top, so I have to cut/paste it below my message. Well, I have found a way around this annoyance in Thunderbird.
Go into your email account settings, and on the top-level properties of the backup/secondary account that you move everything to, set the Email address to the primary email “con...@domain.com” (for this example, in my case). Just underneath the top-level properties, you are still using the correct password and username (which is most likely the backup email address, or at least the part before the “@” symbol, depending on how your server dictates login). In any case, this will allow you to automatically make Replies from the backup account automatically use the primary account when sending the Reply. Also if you use a signature, be sure to add that option to the backup email settings as well. Now you can type Replies from your backup account just like you do from your primary account.
Tags: backup account, email, how email, how thunderbird, main account, main email, outlook, primary account, primary email, reply-to, secondary account, secondary email, send from, thunderbird, user primary