
Prevent Thunderbird from stripping custom headers (e.g. X-Alias) on sending
Hi everyone,
I'm working on a privacy-friendly email setup and ran into a challenge with Thunderbird.
My setup: I have a catch-all email address that forwards all incoming emails sent to *@mydomain.com to my real mailbox, secret@mydomain.com. This way, I can use aliases like alias1@mydomain.com, alias2@mydomain.com, etc., without exposing my actual address.
This part works perfectly.
The problem: When replying to a message sent to alias1@mydomain.com, Thunderbird automatically uses secret@mydomain.com as the sender address. That defeats the purpose — the recipient now sees my secret address, which I wanted to keep hidden.
Thunderbird offers a workaround via identities, but it requires creating a separate identity for every single alias, which becomes unmanageable if you use a lot of them.
My attempted solution: My idea was to have my mail server insert a header like:
X-Alias: alias1@mydomain.com
Then, on sending, the server could rewrite the From: header using that value — thus preserving the alias and protecting my actual address.
However, I discovered that Thunderbird strips custom headers like X-Alias when sending. That breaks the solution.
My questions: 1. Is there any way to configure Thunderbird to preserve specific custom headers like X-Alias during sending? 2. Alternatively, is there a better or recommended approach to achieving what I’m trying to do — replying from the alias address automatically, without exposing the real one, and without creating hundreds of identities?
I’d really appreciate any ideas, insights, or suggestions. Thank you!
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