[MlMt] Use an SMTP server without an associated IMAP server?

Quentin Stafford-Fraser quentin at pobox.com
Wed Mar 6 11:06:49 EST 2024


I have about a dozen email addresses and they all eventually end up in the same Fastmail IMAP account, either because they're my domains and the MX is set up to deliver there, or because they're forwarded from other mail services over which I have less control.

My most-used email address is this 'pobox.com' one, which has been my main address since around the turn of the millennium, and is purely a forwarding alias (hence the 'PO Box' name).

PoBox provide an SMTP server for sending, but not (on my forwarding-only account, anyway) an IMAP server.  So I can't set it up as a fully-fledged separate account in Mailmate.  But these days, I really do need to send through the same SMTP server as my From: address.

So...

What I really want is to have more than one SMTP server associated with my main IMAP account, and select the outgoing server based on my From: address.  I don't think there's a way to do that?

My workaround, for now, is to add another IMAP account that I otherwise barely use, set it up with the PoBox email address and SMTP server, and Mailmate will then send things correctly that way.  I don't need to worry that the IMAP server is empty, but it does have to be a genuine working IMAP server, or Mailmate will mark that account as offline.

It's a bit of a nuisance, too, because Mailmate will also save Drafts and Sent messages onto that otherwise-unused IMAP server.  So I then need to set up rules to move everything to the correct account.  And then I need to do this same setup on all of my machines...

So does anyone have a good way of saying  "Here's an SMTP-only server which you should use when the From address is X" ?

Interestingly Fastmail do provide exactly this facility in their (very good) webmail interface, but when I tried switching to that, I realised that, good as it is, it isn't Mailmate... :-)

Quentin



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