Use alias as full name

AwesomeGeorge

Hi everyone!

First of all, I really love mailcow and learned a lot while hosting it. Keep up the great work!

My question is regarding email aliases. I registered a domain example.com and created a mailbox, let’s say <myname@example.com>. Then I created an alias called <secret@example.com> for myname. I would like to use aliases so they provide some kind of anonymity. Writing and sending an email with <secret@example.com> uses the full name from myname, which destroys the anonymity of course. I can change the full name for <myname@example.com> in SOGo, but this does not seem to change the alias names afterwards, they still use myname and of course I want to use my real name with <myname@example.com>.

My current workaround is to create a mailbox with <secret@example.com> as my “real” mail and some generic name like “fxr2jfl3”. I then create email aliases which also use that name. I have a second mailbox with my real name, i.e. <myname@example.com>. The ideal case would be: Is it somehow possible to change a config so that aliases automatically use their alias name as names? (like secret for <secret@example.com> and evenmoresecrets for <evenmoresecrets@example.com>)

diekuh

It is an alias. An alias is by design an alias of your mailbox. In SOGo you cannot change that.

Just create multiple mailboxes. Edit them in mailcow UI and set the “Sender ACL” to allow your primary mailbox to send from this address. Now you login to SOGo with your secret mailboxes credentials and delegate it to your primay address:

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Login back to your primary mailbox, write a mail and select your secret mailbox as sender. You will automatically use their “from” field.

AwesomeGeorge

diekuh Thanks for the answer. Of course that’s a way to solve the problem, but it’s not the way I want to use it. An alias is (in my opinion) a way to hide from the real address. The email headers seem fine while using an alias, only the used name seems to be the one defined in the mailbox. mailbox.org, for example, and other providers allow creating aliases that automatically use the alias name as a name, i.e. secret <secret@example.com>.

It seems to be a SOGo issue as described here https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized/issues/2997. I decided to create my real mailbox with <myname@example.com> with a generic secret name (so all aliases use this name) and change the From field in SOGo to my real name myname. The aliases still use the secretname which is great, although others see this as an issue https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized/issues/22. For me it’s a feature.

The nice thing: If I use Airmail (MacOS desktop client) and add an alias I created in Mailcow I can choose the name I want!

Would it be possible to add a feature to the mailcow dashboard to edit names per alias additionally the the default edit per mailbox or is this a completely SOGo-dependend feature?

diekuh

An alias is an alias. Just like andre@develcow.de can point to andre.peters@develcow.de etc. - it is not a way to hide a real address or a tool for privacy. It is not its intention.

It is not like this is not able to be archived with mailcow today, it works just fine the way I described above. So I don’t see the point on working on this for hours, when there is a way, that just requires a change in your usage.

An alias is not an address to be used for privacy purpose. It is just an alias. We even have spam aliases btw.
You can - as written before - create a “secret”/anonymous mailbox and go with that - works fine.

It is not a valid feature request for me. If you want to, you can try to implement it to SOGo and/or mailcow. PRs are welcome.

AwesomeGeorge

I absolutely disagree and I guess so do a lot of other people. But I understand your point and that it’s not a “valid” feature request. I’ll just use other methods to achieve the things I want. Thank you nonetheless!