[besson3c]

I haven't read anything about whether any changes have been made to Mail by way of optimization and fixing its IMAP functionality so that it isn't broken, have there been any? Any new features? Multiple identities? Fully functional folder subscriptions? Anything?

[0157988944]

Explain what you mean by multiple identities again? Mail can have multiple IMAP accounts going at once.

[Spheric Harlot]

Multiple identies = different SETS of accounts you can switch between.

Such as switching between three or four business email accounts used during the day and another two or three personal email accounts for after work - without having to log out and back in as a different user on the machine.

[besson3c]

A whole new level of broken would be assignable to Mail if it couldn't handle multiple IMAP accounts

Multiple identities allows you to send as different people with different signatures, from addresses, PGP keys (where applicable), etc. It is very useful for shared mailboxes (not the same as shared email accounts), for accounts that are being pointed at by email aliases where you may want to utilize these different aliases, etc. For instance, if you have an alias setup to direct mail to [email protected] to [email protected] and you want to respond to somebody using the [email protected] from/return address from your [email protected] account, multiple identities facilitate this sort of thing much easier. Pretty much every web-based email client supports multiple identities probably for this very reason.

Think of multiple identities as a way to wear different hats within a single email account, just as the name suggests. OS X Mail is one of very few clients that doesn't support this feature.

[besson3c]

Sorry for posting this to the wrong forum.

[AKcrab]

I don't really understand..

I have a POP and and two IMAP accounts in mail.. When I reply to a message, I can pick which account to send AS, and can independently pick a signature. (If I don't like the default sig for the one I choose.) Both options are right there in a pulldown..

How does multiple identities make it any easier?

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by AKcrab 

I don't really understand..

I have a POP and and two IMAP accounts in mail.. When I reply to a message, I can pick which account to send AS, and can independently pick a signature. (If I don't like the default sig for the one I choose.) Both options are right there in a pulldown..

How does multiple identities make it any easier?

The OS X Mail signature selection is Apple's pseudo answer to this missing feature, but it only addresses part of the problem. What if you also want your outgoing mail to have a different from or return address, say of one of your email aliases such as what I provided in my example?

[Spheric Harlot]

There's a "Reply to:" field in every new mail.

[besson3c]

Which is different than the "From" header. The reply-to field if present designates the message addressed to during reply, but it doesn't control what people see within the incoming message. If the reply-to field is not present, it will just use the from address.