identities

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

This one is something that has been on my wishlist for literally 
years :-)

Most of us have several email accounts, and what I really need is
to be able to send mail from any number of those (my work email,
my personal one, my horde one, my openbsd one, etc etc)

At the moment, it involves laboriously typing it into the From:
field by hand, which kind of sucks.

Now that we have per user prefs, how about extending this somewhat
to allow a user to have multiple identities?  Initially I thought
this could just be a simple list of alternative From: addresses which
would show up in a drop-down instead of a text-field in the compose
window.  But then, stuff like a different signature for each identity
could also be done.

What do other people think about the general idea?  It's something
that's been asked from my users since 2.0 as well, so I'd be
happy to code it in - question is, what is the best way ?

If modelled as overriding portions of the user-preferences to 
apply to sub-identities, then it can be seen as simple to do
from a code point of view (the UI might prove tricky ...)

For example, initially we could override the signature and the
from_addr fields for identities.

Of course, if that's too complicated, I'd happily settle for
extending from_addr to be a list of addresses, and a simple
dropdown :-)

--
Anil Madhavapeddy, <anil@recoil.org>