Mail originating from "me"
 

The majority of my outgoing emails from FM are sent from my PObox.Com address, but many sent from my domain.

Those sent from FM using my Pobox address are all of a sudden shown as having been sent by "me".

I haven't changed any settings, why please is this, and how do I reset so they show as having been sent by "MyName" - i.e. "John Doe".

NJSS

Ticket raised with FM - PTN 1474859

I cannot tell you for certain what is going on. However, most likely is that there is a Sending Identity for the PObox.com address at Fastmail, and the default for the name field has changed. If I am correct, it should be easy just to go to Settings->Sending Identities and Edit the offending Identity.

I've started seeing this this evening too. I regularly send myself work-related messages, either from a work address (not FastMail) to one of my home (FastMail) addresses, or from one home address to the same home address, and I have them saved or routed into the same folder for admin purposes.

Suddenly half of my messages are showing as being from "me", the other half from "Myfirstname Mylastname". As far as I can tell anything originating from my own domain has been changed to "me", while anything from my employer's domain hasn't, even though that address is also saved in my address book profile.

It's made navigating folders, in particular that "work admin" folder, a bit of a nightmare. It's particularly hard on the eyes because of the choice to use all lowercase for "me" while my full name and other full names are properly capitalised. It looks horrible.

I've had a quick look through all the settings and I can't find anywhere to turn this feature off. Whoever thought of this really ought to have run it past a focus group or two because I can't believe I'm the only one bothered by this.

I wonder if this has been introduced as a way of dealing with the new on-demand Masked Email addresses? That would make some sense as you might not want your real name on the headers of throw-away addresses.

Whatever the reason, I'll give good money (or at least kudos) to anyone who can tell me how to turn the damned thing off.

I get calendar reminders its on there also.

If you have edited the Sending Identity in Fastmail for your home email to use the Name you want, and this is being ignored, my next steps would be

• examine the full headers for the message to see if the unwanted content of the name field is being set that way when the message is created, or is being modified somehow in transit (which would cause other problems other than just a bad name field); and
• if there is no clear explanation for the behaviour, contact support, explaining that the settings in your Sending Identity are being ignored.

I have received a response from FM Support:-

NJSS

This was wholly a display change within the web (and possibly mobile) apps. All of the outgoing headers were identical, and third-party clients displayed them as is. At least we know from OP's quoted response that the change was deliberate.

Interestingly I've just gone into two of my catch-all folders and I'm not seeing this behaviour any more. None of the previously affected messages has the "me" in any column or header.

Three possibilities spring immediately to mind:

• FastMail have deliberately removed this feature due to backlash (I haven't seen much actual backlash in public spaces, but maybe they had lots of support tickets...)
  
• They have tweaked it so it only applies when there are multiple recipients in the relevant fields. A quick check of a message sent to me and multiple others suggests this isn't the case but I only checked a single, older, message.
  
• Mitigating the recent DDOS/outage has necessitated a rollback to earlier code without the change, and the change will come again with the next update.

Or, of course, something I haven't thought of. Going to keep an eye on this though. For such a minor change it was disproportionately irritating and I'm glad it's gone.