How can I send an email so it looks like it's from my business domain?

Question

I own the domain example.com and I have set up email forwarding to my personal email address. [email protected] forwards to [email protected] I would like to be able to respond to clients and have it seem like it comes from the [email protected] address. How might I do this? Thanks for all the help!

Answer 1

In order for Thunderbird to be able to proffer the address as a from: address, the address has to be set up in Thunderbird as an incoming address. If it is not possible to set it up as a truly self-standing email address, then you could add it as an identity on a working account.
The remaining part of this is to look at what is being used to send your messages. As an example, if you send using a gmail server, the messages will appear to come from the gmail address associated with the gmail smtp "account" regardless of what address you put into the message itself. Whilst gmail is unusual and perhaps unique in this respect, it does mean that this possibility should be considered.
Another is that some mail providers don't allow "foreign" from: addresses to be used in messages. I have encountered this is the past with two UK ISPs, (bt and freeseeve) whose smtp servers allowed only addresses provided by the ISP, or at least permitted other addresses only when they'd been registered with the ISP-provided mail account. These are clumsy and somewhat naïve attempts to inhibit rogue smtp servers installed on end-users' computers by malware.
In my own case, I lease a domain which apart from a www address and the ability to set up other ad-hoc addresses for ftp and webcams and the like, includes a bundle of email addresses for my family. However, the "real" address is a somewhat clumsy formulation, and some jiggery pokery with a ddns service (zoneedit) allows mx records to be set up so that messages addressed to my domain-connected address to find their way to the "real" accounts. Since I can send a message to my domain-based account, I can set it up in Thunderbird, so it is automatically offered as a candidate from: address when creating or replying to an email message.
In practice, all messages are sent by your smtp server, but are allowed to declare a from: address (and also a separate reply-to address, but that's another matter.) It is possible in your case that the registrar or domain provider also offers an smtp server, but it won't necessarily give your domain as the origin, instead giving the domain of the webhost or registrar or whatever. Choice of smtp often is influenced by other factors, such as can you use it when away from home or your place of business?