I know I've touched on this topic before in conversations with Vince but I'm trying to sort it today and I'm a tad confused (not difficult I know)
At present I have 6 email addresses* related to my business and emails are received to the relevant email box. I believe I can set up aliases so I just have the one mailbox, but looking at it now, as far as I can see I can only send emails from aliases, I cant receive email to the aliases. Is that right or is it something I'm missing?
The other thing I'd like to do is create folders for each client, so if Joe Bloggs sent me an email it would go straight to Joe Bloggs folder, same with replies.
Any help, or a pointer in the right direction would be gratefully received.
* I could no doubt get rid of a couple of these.
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John
Any advice given is for general guidance and professional advice should be sought applicable to your circumstances.
Thunderbird doesn't control what you can receive - that's down to how you set up your server. To be able to receive at all your aliases, the mail server needs to know how to deal with any differently addressed email you receive.
So that's your starting point. You might find your mailboxes were set up with just a single email address each - you need to point the addresses for the 'other five' to the one you want to use. How you do this depends on your hosting set up.
(You might have to specify aliases for the mailbox, for example, or - as with mine - 'forward' each address to the mailbox you want to use.)
Once that's done, you'll be receiving email (via that mailbox) at each of the different email aliases, and can then filter on them.
Funnily enough, I've gone in the opposite direction since we last talked about this (unless I'm misremembering when we last discussed it). I had a 'clients' subdomain and mailbox, so all client-related email would come to that and be filtered according to the actual email alias into a different folder - but now I've set up a separate mailbox for each client.
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
Thanks Vince. I must have misunderstood you before as I thought that the emails would go straight to the alias. I understand what you mean about forwarding but that's not what I wanted. I will already be forwarding leger to ybal so this will probably complicate it even further.
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John
Any advice given is for general guidance and professional advice should be sought applicable to your circumstances.
Sometimes these things can seem complicated (especially when communicating them to - and from - others, because it's too easy to misread things), but it's often just a case of sitting back and thinking about it. A notebook can sometimes be helpful, too - to organise your thoughts on what you want to do.
If I've understood your post, you want a single POP3 (or IMAP) mailbox. Let's call it john@example.com - and working it through logically, you start by setting up (or thinking about on paper) just that mailbox:
You configure your mail server so that you have that one mailbox - and by default, all email to john@example.com will go into it.
But in most cases, the server will ONLY pick up mail to john@example.com - the server doesn't know about client1@example.com, etc.
Now you configure your email client to fetch your email from that mailbox. Your (single) inbox will therefore see all mail to john@example.com
At this stage, the server and your email program both know only that one address. You can receive mail to it, and you can send mail from it.
Now you need to think about aliases.
The server can't receive email to client1@example.com, because it doesn't know about it - so you need to tell the server to accept mail for that address into the same mailbox. (I should add, I mentioned forwarding because that's the way my mail server works - or, perhaps more accurately, that's the terminology used by my hosting company in their control panel.)
So for each one you want to use:
By whatever method your hosting company calls it, the server has to know to accept email sent to client1@example.com at the john@example.com mailbox.
Once that's done, Thunderbird will happily receive email sent to client1@example.com because it's seeing everything in the john@example.com mailbox, which is where that email ends up.
You can add a filter to Thunderbird to put that email in a different folder, specific to that address.
And you can add an alias within Thunderbird (account settings -> manage identities) so that you can send email from that address.
Those last steps can be repeated for each alias you want to use.
Having thought through logically how you want to do it, you can then do so. You don't necessarily need to do things in that order - you could set up the filters and aliases in Thunderbird first, then deal setting them up on the server, or you could set all of them up on the server first, then do it al in Thunderbird.
Edit: Missed a bullet. Not dodged a bullet - missed a bullet. ;)
-- Edited by VinceH on Tuesday 22nd of August 2017 10:58:04 PM
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
