Tuesday, July 01 2003

The MTA qmail has a nice feature. Deliveries to local accounts are handled by dot qmail files in the user's home directory. The default delivery file is simply called .qmail and contains instructions of how and where to deliver incoming messages. In the default installation of qmail a user also has control of the address name space below his or her username. That is, the user Joe is in control not only of the address joe@example.com but also every address starting with joe-, for example joe-banking@example.com, joe-programming@example.com etc. To set up these addresses Joe only has to create the files .qmail-banking and .qmail-programming and fill them with delivery instructions.

I have a few of these sub-addresses on my personal mail server. However, until this morning I didn't know how to make Mac OS X's mail client Mail recognize these sub-addresses without adding a new account, which I did not want to do (I actually sent a feature request to Apple some time ago regarding this). It turns out Mail has (probably) handled this for a long time. The obvious solution (thank you Urban), which I never tried out, was simply to add another address to the Email address field in the preferences for the account. The address entered in preferences is used by Mail as the envelope sender when delivering mail to an SMTP server (the MAIL FROM command).

From now on, when I compose a new message in Mail the account pop up button is populated with my sub-addresses and the message will originate from that real address. No need to set Reply-To manually, no need to use mutt on the server anymore. Wonderful!