For the Starlight Express... did you have much success ?

[venta]

It's that time of year again - the time when I discover that I cannot achieve that which my parents wish me to achieve with their computer. This is not as serious as last year (when a small omission with a jumper inexplicably toastered the entire thing). In fact it's not serious at all. It's just irritating. Any ideas ?

The parents wish to collect email from multiple email accounts. This is not a problem. I have set up an extra three accounts, each of which successfully sends and receives its own mail. So far, so good.

However, if an email comes in to one of the addresses, and you hit "reply", I would like the "From" address to be set to the right thing - that is, the address to which the email to which you're replying was sent.

I'm sure that, when I set this up on their previous computer, it all Just Worked. However, now it seems that when you reply to a mail it defaults to sending it from the account most recently added. Which, I might add, isn't even the default account. If I temporarily omit that account from the send-and-receive process, it defaults to the next most recently added. Which also isn't the default.

It is, of course, possible to select the desired account from the drop down From list. But that's an annoyance and something it's easy to forget to do.

I have mulled and puzzled through Outlook Express' many menus, and have failed to find anything which appears to relate to this. I had thought there was a checkbox relating to the address you used to reply, but if there is I simply can't find it. There is also a distressing lack of "just do the right thing, dammit" boxes.

I have tried: removing and re-adding the accounts, switching the default account around, and turning it off and back on again (both OE and the entire machine).

Interestingly (or not) the behaviour of replies to a specific email seems to relate to the state and settings at the time that email was received, not at the time of replying. Which is also a bit daft.

Does anyone have any advice to offer?

Comments

[hughe.livejournal.com]

is there a way to select a default smtp outgoing account for the incoming account? i think it is tied to that.. or at least is on some versions of outlook

[venta.livejournal.com]

No, you have to enter the SMTP server manually for each account. They all use the same SMTP server, because all the addresses redirect to the same one anyway.

[zotz]

Use Opera instead?

[venta.livejournal.com]

The parents are keen to stick with the client they know. Otherwise they'd be using Eudora or Thunderbird if I had my way :)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

What version of OE is it?

Fortunately I've never had to use the thing myself, but my mum does so I could check what I set up for her in a similar situation last year. (Of course, I might have just unhelpfully told her to use the From: dropdown.)

Outlook Express vs Outlook

[(Anonymous)]

MS Office Outlook does reply from the mail account to which messages are sent (or at least my Office 2003 version seems to, and in other respects behaves like Outlook Express. If the Parents are using MS Office for word processing, spreadsheets etc, try setting them up using Outlook as their default email application.

W

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I have a similar problem with GMail in some cases. After a while puzzling over it the thought occurred to me that GMail doesn't actually know which of my email addresses incoming mail was directed to and so the behaviour I was hoping for is actually impossible (although can be faked successfully in the vast majority of cases).

This isn't true of Outlook Express though, because it can make a note of which account it was collecting for when it saves the incoming message.

This is my long way of saying I don't know the answer to your question, though anecdotal evidence suggests that Outlook Express doesn't support a proper solution for this.

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I believe I have a similar setup and it works as it should. Just to confirm: you have one Identity and three email accounts associated with it, rather than three Identities each with one email account? (For the expected former you'd see all the email accounts in separate trees in your Folder list; for the latter you'd select the Identity at start up and be able to change it from the File menu, and see email from one account at a time in your Folder list.)

My email is set up with one identity and two separate email accounts.

When you select Tools->Internet Accounts and the Mail tab, do you get your three different accounts listed? And when you create or reply to a mail, is the From field a drop-down box from which you can select the account you want?

The behaviour I get is that when you reply, the default From field is the account the email came into. When you create mail the default From field depends on which folder was selected in the Folder list.

If you want to go through all the IE options on your parents' setup and mine looking for some subtle difference then give me a call. I'll email the phone number to your personal and work addresses (and check here also in case you can't access those at the moment!)