In Options, Personal Information, Edit your identities, the following fields appear:

1. Your alias addresses
2. Addresses to explicitly tie to this identity

How are these fields used by webmail. Under what circumstances would someone use these fields? This is just for my education, not something that I am likely to use.

I'd also like to know the answer to this. I have two spamcop accounts, and each has multiple email addresses tied to them, (1) because I have one or more domain names acting as an exact mirror for a primary domain in terms of email processing, and (2) I have numerous aliases, i.e. webmaster, webmistress, postmaster, that all go into the same POP account.

I want to make sure that messages with any of these valid addresses aren't discarded by SpamCop, but I'm really not sure about the differences between these two fields. For now, I have them entered under the "Alias addresses" section, but I'd really like to know if I should be using the "Explicitly tie to this identity" option at all.

I couldn't find this distinction addressed in a FAQ anywhere, and this is the only post I've seen about it when searching on the terms webmail and identity.

~Cherie

Since nobody answered the original query, I will take my best stab at it. Usually, if you post incorrect information, people correct it quite quickly here.

As far as I know, the identities are used only for sending out email and for putting the little face on the message list when the address matches one of your identities.

I would thing these two entries would only be used to determine if the messqage was sent to one of your identities.

I have a separate identity created for each of the addresses I use so I can create messages (replies) for each of my addresses.

I think Steven is correct. I just did a little testing and even some Google searching on this function of IMP (Horde webmail). Here's what I found:

1. if someone sends a message either to the primary address of one of your identities or one of the addresses in the alias box for that identity, you will see the "Personal" icon (human head) by that message, and also, if you reply to that message, the system automatically changes your "From" to the associated identity

2. although I tried putting an address in the "Addresses to explicitly tie to this identity" box and then sent messages to various identity and non-identity defined addresses from that address, I couldn't detect any results from having put an address in that box...I tried replying to the messages and even though I had "explicitly tied" the address to a specific identity, the system didn't switch to that identity when replying

Therefore, although the Aliases box can be useful, I have no idea of what the "explicitly tie" function is supposed to do. In fact, if you put "explicitly tie to this identity" into Google as a phrase search, you'll start with hits to this thread in the Forums, and then find three links to CVS (Concurrent Versions System) files at Horde.org (the home of the webmail software) and a single IMP patch at a consulting site. In other words, it sounds like none of the other sites that offer this type of webmail are using the "explicitly tie" function, because I surfed into various Helpdesk sites explaining their local implementations of IMP, looking at some of their screenshots, and saw that the other sites don't even display that box.

I think that the only person who can answer this is JT, so....

DT