Replying to incoming email address from same address

[John Gray]

I don't know if this can be done in Outlook (or any other mail client), but I would like to receive emails at a variety of addresses, such as
amazon@mydomain.com
argos@mydomain.com
anything@mydomain.com
and be able to reply to them using the same address to which they were sent, regardless of whatever is defined in Accounts in Outlook.

This would mean (I think) in the first instance that my outgoing email would have a Sender address and From address of amazon@mydomain.com.

Can this be done?

Thanks

[HansV]

Set up a separate account for each of these aliases, and set each of them (except for your main one) to use them for sending e-mail only, not for receiving. You can then select the account from the Account dropdown when replying (perhaps it'll be set automatically, but I doubt it).

See Creating Another Email Address in Outlook or Outlook Express for detailed instructions.

[Leif]

I have several accounts which Outlook collects mail from and deposits them in either the Inbox or a specified folder.

By default, if I reply to an email from a specific account, the reply is sent using the same (incoming) account.

I can also receive on one account, and reply on another, or create a new email and specify which account it should go through:

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However, I think it would get rather complicated if all your email accounts are forwarded to a single address from which you download all your mail. You would still need to set-up Outlook with the details of the account you wish to reply from, and send it through the relevant mailbox, not the common one.

Warning: if you receive through one account and reply through another, you are likely to get the horrendous:
From: amazon@mydomain.com (on behalf of argos@mydomain.com)

[StuartR]

I receive email through 5 or 6 different accounts, and when I reply to any of these emails Outlook automatically sets the outgoing address to the correct value.

I also have a catchall address that receives any other email sent to my domain. When I reply to one of these emails, Outlook sets the outgoing address to be the generic catchall address that received the email. I guess I could set up a separate Outlook account for every email alias that I ever create, but it would be really good if I could find a way to automatically set the reply to come from the address the email was sent to.

[John Gray]

Perhaps I should have indicated that I might have a very large number of email addresses of the form
<something>@mydomain.com
(perhaps up to a hundred). I would already have had to set these up on the mydomain.com 'website', so having to set them up for a second time in Outlook would be tedious and error-prone.

I'll read through all the suggestions over the weekend, and see if any is practical for industrial quantities of addresses! I certainly don't want the "on behalf of" construct!

[StuartR]

John,

If you are prepared to change email clients then it looks like this Thunderbird addon will do what you want.

[John Gray]

All I need is for it to be an add-in for Firefox or Outlook!

[StuartR]

All I need is for it to be an add-in for Firefox or Outlook!

I did look around for an Outlook add-in but couldn't find anything.

I guess it needs someone very clever with VBA to write code that modifies a generic email account to set the from address and then uses it to send the email. Does Outlook VBA expose the objects needed to modify an account?

[HansV]

Outlook VBA doesn't expose that, perhaps one of the lower-level MAPI libraries. But I don't know anything about those...

[John Gray]

All I need is for it to be an add-in for Firefox or Outlook!

I did look around for an Outlook add-in but couldn't find anything.

Thanks for your efforts! I had a quick look at Bells and Whistles (for other reasons) some time back, and may revisit...

[Goshute]

Jefferson Scher wrote a code snippet that always pops the send address dialog when a message is sent, but that's about as close as you can get with code. Something like: ActiveExplorer.CommandBars.FindControl(ID:=????).Execute tied in with the Item Send event. That would have been posted an another MS User Forum a few years back.

[John Gray]

Returning to this subject after a break, I wonder whether Outlook 2010 gives a possible answer?

See Direct Reply To Different Email Address In Outlook 2010.

I find that if I send to one address an email with the "reply to" feature set up, then clicking Reply on that email in the InBox gives the pre-set-up and corresponding To address.

This is not quite the same as "replying to incoming email address from same address", but maybe half-way there?

[jscher2000]

Direct Reply To Different Email Address In Outlook 2010.

I find that if I send to one address an email with the "reply to" feature set up, then clicking Reply on that email in the InBox gives the pre-set-up and corresponding To address.

This is not quite the same as "replying to incoming email address from same address", but maybe half-way there?

Half way, yes, exactly. This feature does not alter the FROM address, only the REPLY-TO address.

For some reason (anti-spam?), Outlook doesn't let you change the FROM address from the one in the settings for the account from which you are sending: Outlook.MailItem.SenderEmailAddress is read-only. One might think to dynamically change the account settings, but the entire Outlook.Account object appears to be read-only. You would have to manually change them through the UI, which probably only makes sense for a large batch of mail.

(I can't rule out some hacks via third party libraries, but I don't have any such libraries available to check.)