Mike said:
Hi
I have five e-mail accounts in Outlook 2003, these are generic where by I
can have anything I like in front of the @ symbol.
When I get a mail sent to any of these they are filtered into folders.
However when I reply from the mail it does not use the same
address/account.
It has even occurred that a old deleted account address was used to send a
reply.
How can I make outlook reply from the same account as the sender has used?
For a reply, Outlook, by default, will use the same account through which
the e-mail was received. Apparently you are using one e-mail account
through which a bunch of bogus-named accounts are defined (i.e., the
username is irrelevant). However, that is still just one account, that is
the account that you polled to get those mails, and that will be the default
account through which any replies to those mails will be sent. Outlook is
not designed to support bogus- or variable-usernamed accounts. Outlook *IS*
using the same account through which the mail was received.
What you define as your e-mail or reply-to addresses in an account defined
in any e-mail client is NOT what gets used to deliver your mails. The
recipient e-mails addresses specified in the To, Cc, and Bcc fields in your
e-mail client's compose window are also not used to route your mails. Those
are just *data* that is part of the message that you send (they get put into
the "header" section which is simply at the top of the message with a space
line delimiter). The e-mail client sends RCPT-TO commands to the mail
server to specify the recipients. These RCPT-TO commands may be an
aggregate list of those specified in the To, Cc, and Bcc fields when you
composed the mail but it could also be from a completely separate list
outside of the e-mail client. In fact, the To, Cc, and Bcc headers (along
with the Subject header) are completely optional: they may appear zero or
one times. They are just data within the sender's message.
That means the e-mail client must pick an actual *account* to use when
connecting to the mail server, and that has nothing to do with the *data*
contained within your message. So Outlook picks the account through which
the message was received when you choose to reply to that message. This can
result in a problem if you get a message, delete the e-mail account through
which that message was received, and then try to reply but the e-mail
account no longer exists through which that message was received. Outlook
cannot send your reply because the account isn't there anymore (I don't know
if this got fixed so Outlook would then switch to using the default mail
account).
The *data* you put in the E-mail and Reply-To is just that: data. You can
put anything you want in those fields. You could put in someone else's
e-mail address. You could put in a munged e-mail address (notice that is
what most posters do in newsgroups). You might even be able to leave it
blank or put in any string that doesn't even match the syntax for an e-mail
address. It has nothing to do with which account gets used to send your
mails with those data fields contained inside your message. That's similar
to how spammers lie about from where their turds originated. Just like you,
they can put anything they want in those headers but none of them are used
in routing their mails. Listservers and bulk mailers work the same way.
The sender sends a list of recipients in a file to the mail server. Then
the sender sends a message to the listserver which delivers the message to
each recipient listed in that separate file. Doesn't matter what e-mail
addresses were specified in the To, Cc, and Bcc fields because they are
irrelevant to the list of recipients that actually gets used.
Since you don't give a gnat's fart about what username is specified before
the domain (i.e., all mails delivered to that domain end up delivered to
your account), why do you care about what username gets used in a reply?
You are obviously lying to the senders that a username was valid. Use a
general username in your replies, like sales, support, service, or whatever.
There is nothing in Outlook that will take the To header in the sender's
message and copy it into the From header in your replies. You could define
N e-mail accounts for the N bogus usernames, all of which use the same mail
account, and you will then need to use the Accounts toolbar button to select
the e-mail account which has the username that you want to use in a reply.
