One suggestion: Create an address book that is reserved specifically for your various email addresses. You could start by adding the most commonly used email addresses and add the additional ones as they arise.

• select that address book.
• 'click on 'New contacts' to Create a new contact for each various email address.
• In the 'Display' text box, type : ME
• Select checkbox: 'Always prefer display name over message header'
• click on OK

Check other address books to see if your email addresses are in any of them and also set the 'Display' as mentioned above or delete you as a contact as you will be in the other special address book.

That's not a solution to the problem, simply having Thunderbird show 'Me' for these e-mail addresses won't actually have Thunderbird treat them as part of the same identity.

So you'd still get the same issue when viewing the From/Correspondents columns in the Sent folder, and also still get the same issue when using Reply-All.

Thunderbird generates "ME" on the fly at the time of display/execution. There is not going to be a solution to your issue of historical mail, except to archive your profile and start a new one with new mail. Apparently not something you would like as this topic is all about historical mail.

Thebes I can suggest is you disable "ME" in options and display the display names from the original emails. Options > Display > advanced.

As for reply all. You have changed your identify, so of course who is replying is no longer the recipient. So that will fail.

This question wasn't really about getting 'Me' (as text) to show up, and I already understand why and when it shows and for what reasons. I was only talking about 'Me' (the text) as a way of knowing when Thunderbird has or has not understood if an address is or is not connected to an identity.

I had a feeling Thunderbird couldn't cope with this kind of situation.

I've already logged it as a feature request on the Bugzilla instead a couple of days back in anticipation that this would be the answer.

Additionally even if I was fine with multiple profiles to dig through for old mail (which I'm not), this just isn't feasible when most online accounts keep all the mail storage server-side which'd mean (unless somehow intervening with extra config) it'd all sync back down anyway (historical included).

I guess a workaround might be for me to write a little script to edit the Thunderbird config files directly to feed in 40 identities (it's not like they'd need any proper settings like signatures etc, just the correct e-mail address in them) - but it'd be nice if there was a way of telling Thunderbird to make some identities invisible (i.e. not to show on the compose window).

Any ideas on that angle of this question?

re : I've updated the Thunderbird identity e-mail field to match....Thunderbird no longer recognises that I sent them....also still get the same issue when using Reply-All.

As you have probably guessed by now; you need to tell Thunderbird that those other email addresses are part of the same group of identities associated with that mail account. Account Settings > Manage Identities' button. Then it should not have the issue with a 'Reply-all' . Worth checking in Config Editor set mailnews.reply_to_self_check_all_ident to true.

The 'Write' window 'From' drop down will contain all identies of all your mail accounts. So yes, this would end up displaying quite a list if you chose to add all of them. That's because Thunderbird is assuming you may want to send using that alternative identity. If you are not a recognised identity then 'Reply-all' is not going to know that some non-identity email addresses are you.

bit of a catch 22 if you do want all email addresses recognised as identity, but do not necessarilly intend to send emails from them.

I have an idea....There is an addon that may be worth considering. Let's assume you added all those email addresses as additional identities to resolve the 'Reply-all' issue, so you did have a long list in 'From' drop down.

It would make life easier if you could easily identify the most important identites/email addresses. There is an addon extension called 'Account Colors' where you could change the font and background colour for the account and then set that color to be used in the 'Compose' tab...aka Write Window. This forces a highlight on the email addresses shown in the drop down section. If you see that effect on the Folder Pane mail account and folders as well, then change the Addon Option via the 'Folder Pane' tab, removing selected checkboxes.

You end up with only the 'From' drop down showing a specific highlight on most freqently used email address which just might make life so much easier.

'Correspondents' column is really useful for those who have set up a folder to contain both received emails and emails you have sent. Otherwise it really only shows the same as 'From' or 'Recipient'.

When I mentioned using the address book 'Display' option. You could enter the email address, so the 'From' column shows the actual email address which might help you.

Whilst that "mailnews.reply_to_self_check_all_ident" setting does seem interesting (it's default is 'false' by the way), it isn't really fixing the issue and I'm concerned it'd be checking *ALL* identities regardless of account they're under (for me that's bad as I have multiple accounts and if I send an e-mail from my work e-mail to my home e-mail I don't want it recognizing it as coming from 'Me' - as displayed, since it came from outside the account).

I'm not after new identities in any case... that is just plainly the wrong English word to use to describe the functionality I need! I won't compound that confusion by using multiple "Identities" to solve a problem that they were not designed for, what is needed is aliases!

If I meet someone in the street who is doing a survey and they write my name down on a form as 'Steve' instead of 'Steven'. I am *not* using a secret alternate identity like a crazy person :) At most this can be considered either spelt wrong, a nickname or an alias!

I already have an extra Thunderbird identity inside this particular account for sending mail out as support@ for example - because that is a wholly different thing to *ME* (the individual member of staff) sending mail, replies come back a different route (to a team) and it uses a different signature. That's the real use of identities in my mind.

We need to differentiate this as ALIASES (granted a feature that doesn't yet exist) and it'd be similar (only client side) to how the proxyAddresses attribute (an Active Directory attribute used by Exchange, not that I'm an MS fan but my works e-mail server is on 365). In the Active Directory attribute editor (see the attached image I nicked off images.google.com) you can see how you specify all your aliases and nominate which one is the primary by prefixing it "SMTP:" instead of simply "smtp:".

So in my case "SMTP:steven@..." became "smtp:steven@..." and "smtp:steven.surname@..." became "SMTP:steven.surname@...".

But I know of many other mail servers that allow the setting up of aliases (actually calling them aliases on the server side rather than something stupid like proxyAddresses).

Maybe one day we'll get this feature properly, I do propose this way of doing it though...

Support a new useraliases string holding an array like this... mail.identity.idXX.useraliases = "("steven@domain.com" "steven.surname@domain.com" "stephen@domain.com")"

Then keep the existing useremail string the same, so something like... mail.identity.idXX.useremail = "steven.surname@domain.com"

Thunderbird can then find all aliases (i.e. things to treat and display as 'Me') by reading *both* 'useraliases' (which can be blank or unset if you like) *and* 'useremail'. With whichever e-mail address is in 'useremail' being treated the primary alias (the one seen when picking an identity from the From: drop down). This should ensure backwards compatibility too.

Any thoughts?

There used to be an add-on called NotTo, which you could use to prvent sending a message to one of your own addresses, but it looks unmaintained ever since Thunderbird 31... (I know, still only a (non-working) work-around :-))