Voltechs

I'm a bit of an obsessive compulsive organization freak when it comes to the digital world. Despite what you might think from looking at my desktop, I like to keep things organized and consolidated. In fact, I just got finished reorganizing my iTunes music folder (which hardly ever needs it, but apple recently reorganized the way they store different types of media so I took advantage of that and resolved some duplicate file issues at the same time).

Anyhow, I recently was brought on as a contractor for a small web-firm—sounds spiffy, kinda like a law-firm—to do some work. I was of course given an email address with the appropriate domain name to reflect the company. Since I have my own "Company" (Twilight Coders) which I try to consolidate my work under, I wanted to be able to keep a copy of the email transactions in the email account associated with Twilight Coders. Not only this, but I wanted to go a step further; I wanted to be able to reply from said email account, under the guise of the "new" email account (the company for which I'll be contracting). Well, since I use Gmail—or, more accurately, Google Apps—for hosting my email, I knew that this "feature" was supported.

In order to accomplish this, you do one of the following:

# Log into your "new" email account. (The one you want to retrieve emails from)
# Go to "Settings" then "Forwarding and POP/IMAP", and enable POP
# Log into your "old" email account. (The one you want to use as your "master" email account)
# Go to "Accounts" and click "Add another email address you own"
# You'll be asked for the email address. Enter it, and click next.
# You'll be sent a confirmation email to the email address you just entered. Open up that email, find the code (buncha' numbers) and enter those in the screen that should still be open after you clicked next in the previous step. Click finish (or continue, whatever it says) and you should be good.
# Check the radio button that says "Reply from the same address the message was sent to". This is really the magic. It will automatically detect (yes, wow, such a feat!) which email address to use when replying so parties on the other end will never know of your other email address or that you've even set them up this way.
# Now click "Add a mail account you own" (under "Get mail from other accounts") Follow the onscreen instructions to suck the emails from your "new" account to your "old" account using POP3.
# You're done!

Note: This process (according to gmail when I tried it) does not allow you to leave a copy of the email on the server using POP3 (which is the only option regardless). Another method would be to forward your email from one account to the other. I'm not sure how well this will work. It might take the liberty of changing the email address it was sent to, to your "old" email address, thereby negating the ability to reply as if you were the new account. (Did you follow all that?)

Ok, so now you've got that set up, but wait!

I don't use the gmail client. I use <insert desktop mail client here>, and it doesn't let me send messages with a different email unless I make an entire new account.

Right. I had the same question! Luckily (for us OS X users) there is a solution. This is one of those times when the solution (albeit hidden, and not quite intuitive) definitely makes sense, and is a very simple, and clean solution. You can follow the instructions provided by apple, or just continue reading:

# Open Mail.app, and go to preferences.
# Select accounts, and select the "primary" account.
# In the "Account Information" tab, there is a field for "Email Address". You can place as many email addresses you'd like to be associated with this account as you'd like, simply delineate them with a comma. For example: "joe@trickster.net, joe.fue@anothersite.com".

That's it! You should be all set. It worked for me. Mail automatically selected the correct email address to reply as when replying to an email. It's perfect! Hope this helps :)