[quote user="GordonM"]

1. Can I associate several aliases with a single Mercury user account (so far as I can see, there is nothing to prevent this),?
2. Is there any practical limit to the number of aliases that can be associated with each Mercury user account?
3. Can aliases be subjected to the Mercury Filtering and Content Control capabilities (it would provide considerable flexibility if alias-addressed messages could be individually re-directed, or modified in some way by the filtering process)?[/quote]

Short Answer: 1. Yes, 2. No, 3. Yes.

My current ISP provides the capabilty to set up "disposable addresses".  These are aliases and one can have up to 500 related to each real e-mail addresses.  With the 5 addresses that I can use on my ISP account, this amounts to a lot of alias addresses.  I currently use several hundred of these aliases, which I give to commercial organizations and other non-personal contacts (e.g. forums).  They are a useful tool for preventing the underlying e-mail address being compromised by spammers (including tracing how spammers obtained the address).

I am considering changing ISP and the one that I am thinking of changing to, although it offers the "disposable address" feature, does so with a much lower limit.  I am, therefore, thinking of setting up this feature using Mercury.  I have three questions:

1. Can I associate several aliases with a single Mercury user account (so far as I can see, there is nothing to prevent this),?
2. Is there any practical limit to the number of aliases that can be associated with each Mercury user account?
3. Can aliases be subjected to the Mercury Filtering and Content Control capabilities (it would provide considerable flexibility if alias-addressed messages could be individually re-directed, or modified in some way by the filtering process)?

In some cases, I will want to send mail from these alias addresses.  I presume that I will have to set up real accounts for each of these names, unless I set up a common "reply" account, e.g. commercial-reply@mydomain.com.

Thank you

Gordon

> My current ISP provides the capabilty to set up "disposable
> addresses".  These are aliases and one can have up to 500 related to
> each real e-mail addresses.  With the 5 addresses that I can use on my
> ISP account, this amounts to a lot of alias addresses.  I currently use
> several hundred of these aliases, which I give to commercial
> organizations and other non-personal contacts (e.g. forums).  They are
> a useful tool for preventing the underlying e-mail address being
> compromised by spammers (including tracing how spammers obtained the
> address).
>
> I am considering changing ISP and the one that I am thinking of
> changing to, although it offers the "disposable address" feature, does
> so with a much lower limit.  I am, therefore, thinking of setting up
> this feature using Mercury.  I have three questions:
>
> Can I associate several aliases with a single Mercury user account (so
> far as I can see, there is nothing to prevent this),?

Yes.


> Is there any practical limit to the number of aliases that can be
> associated with each Mercury user account?

I do not know, I've never used hundreds of aliases pointing to a single mailbox but I do not see any reason it would not work.

> Can aliases be subjected to the Mercury Filtering and Content Control
> capabilities (it would provide considerable flexibility if
> alias-addressed messages could be individually re-directed, or modified
> in some way by the filtering process)?

The alias is in the message most of the time so it should not be a problem.


> In some cases, I will want to send mail from these alias addresses.  I
> presume that I will have to set up real accounts for each of these
> names, unless I set up a common "reply" account, e.g.
> commercial-reply@mydomain.com.

And that's why I do not use aliases but separate accounts to do this.  The account is setup to forward the mail to the main account so that most of these accounts all go to the main account.  

All you have to do then is run Pegasus Mail as that user and send the mail.  I generally do not have a shortcut for all user so I just do the following.

Start | Run C:\pmail\winpm-32.exe -i merwin -ms

Hi Thomas - Thank you for the reply.  I suppose that there is probably no disadvantage in creating users rather than aliases for the addresses that I want to use.  Either way, I can use a "root" name, with appropriate appendages, to facilitate filtering.  My inclination to use aliases was because I thought it might be more efficient to create them, using malias, but maybe this is not the case.  I am not sure whether I can create real users from a database.  Yes, the forwarding that you describe is what I intend to do, in most cases.

I haven't tried Pegasus for years but, maybe, I should try again, given the integration that can be achieved with Mercury.  As you may possibly recall, I was trying to switch to Thunderbird, but I encountered the still unsloved problem of blank messages, so I have stayed with Outlook Express.  The downside of OE for sending mail from many accounts is that I think that I will have to create an account in OE so that the From: address can be used.  So far as I know, this means  that I will have potentially dozens of account folders showing in the OE Folders pane ... this will be a real pain!  I don't think that this is necessarily the case with TB and I am not sure about Pegasus ... I suspect not from what you have described.

Thank you

Gordon

> Hi Thomas - Thank you for the reply.  I suppose that there is probably
> no disadvantage in creating users rather than aliases for the addresses
> that I want to use.  Either way, I can use a "root" name, with
> appropriate appendages, to facilitate filtering.  My inclination to use
> aliases was because I thought it might be more efficient to create
> them, using malias, but maybe this is not the case.  I am not sure
> whether I can create real users from a database.

Yes you can but it means that you are going to have to create a program to read the database, create the pmail.usr file, the users directories and a couple of basic files.  I've done this in the past with a BATCH file and BASIC program.  It's not rocket science.  ;-)

> Yes, the forwarding that you describe is what I intend to do, in most cases.

Aliases take too much time to create and manage and are an additional process that has to talk to the disk.  I find that simply creating a new user is a lot easier.

>
> I haven't tried Pegasus for years but, maybe, I should try again, given
> the integration that can be achieved with Mercury. 

Correct.  Pegasus Mail does not need to use any POP3/IMAP4 to get the mail or SMTP when sending.

> As you may possibly recall, I was trying to switch to Thunderbird, but I
> encountered the still unsloved problem of blank messages, so I have
> stayed with Outlook Express.  The downside of OE for sending mail from
> many accounts is that I think that I will have to create an account in
> OE so that the From: address can be used. 

Agreed.  I know of no way to dynamically to select a From: address in either Outlook or OE.  You can in Thunderbird but again you need to setup an account to do this selection.


> So far as I know, this means  that I will have potentially dozens of
> account folders showing in the OE Folders pane ... this will be a real
> pain!  I don't think that this is necessarily the case with TB and I am
> not sure about Pegasus ... I suspect not from what you have described.

Same thing in Thunderbird, you need the account setup before it can be used. You can setup identities in Pegasus Mail to send using any From: address you want and you select the identity at the time of sending.  When used with the Mercury UDG though it requires a minor change to use a Reply To: address in the UDG.

Thank you, Thomas.  I'll explore possibilities with Pegasus .... it probably only makes sense, given I am using Mercury.

Gordon