Hotmail address: how to hide it?

Life Technology
1

Let’s consider the situation where I am a technical advisor for a company named BigChip. On the company’s website, an email address is provided for inquires: tech@bigchip.com

In reality, the company’s website has no space reserved for this email account, and indeed these technical services/consulting are contracted out to me. Hence, what actually happens is that any mail sent to ttech123@hotmail.com

Now, when someone writes into ttech123@hotmail.com.

In preparation for answering this email, I have logged on to my Hotmail account, I indicated my name as BigChip Consulting, and I have gone to the OPTIONS and set the “reply to” to indicate tech@bigchip.com

In order to test this arrangement, I arrange to correspond with a friend. I have my friend (email address: tech@bigchip.com with a random inquiry, under the Subject of “Pentium VII chip specs”. The email is forwarded to my Hotmail account as expected and I make a reply.

When my friend (the original inquirer) goes to ask for further clarification in relation to various points I mentioned in my original reply, he hits the REPLY button in his email software. An email form comes up. What he sees in the “Send To” space is tech@bigchip.com

In the Subject line, he sees “Pentium VII chip specs”.

However, in the body of the message, he sees a Header and the copy of the original email. The Header says
----- Original Message -----
From: BigChip Consulting: ttech123@hotmail.com
To: george@abcde.com.tw
Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2002 8:45 AM
Subject: Pentium VII chip specs

= * = * = * = * = * = * = = = = = =
Comments: This is unfortunately, not desirable. I do not want the actual hotmail address to be readily seen.

Is there any way to hide the Hotmail address under such circumstances? Is there perhaps another setting available somewhere in the OPTIONS? I don’t seem to find it.

2

Just delete (from the mail you are sending)

----- Original Message -----
From: BigChip Consulting: ttech123@hotmail.com
To: george@abcde.com.tw
Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2002 8:45 AM
Subject: Pentium VII chip specs

If you have many many messages per day I can offer a more complex solution(you only have to set it up once) but you will need to change a few things.

3

Sorry, there was apparently some confusion generated by my description of the problem.

I know of no way to delete it.

The “Original Message” Header is what george is seeing. He is responding to an email that I sent him.

The problem is: I don’t want him to see the Hotmail address.

4

Hi Richard,

I just did a test myself between using my POP account and my Hotmail account and could not reproduce this situation. In my test, when you set up your own “reply-to” in “Options,” Hotmail keeps the inegrity of that in the header fields of “from” and “reply-to”. Can you try again, and/or provide exact steps to reproduce?

5
quote[quote]In my test, when you set up your own "reply-to" in "Options," Hotmail keeps the inegrity of that in the header fields of "from" and "reply-to".[/quote]

Jeremy: You sure about that? That would make it very easy to fake the From address, something that Hotmail probably would not want.

Hartzell: I would say that there isn’t a way you can do it with Hotmail. If you have a POP3/IMAP mail account, it’s fairly simple. Get the company to provide you an email account, it’s not a lot to ask.

6

you can reproduce it if you hit “reply all” instead of “reply”. There is no way to do it via emails sent out of hotmail when the person hits reply all. People have more of a tendency to hit reply all instead of reply. There are ways to change the sender the way spammers do which I won’t get into.

Mark

7

I totally agree with Jeremy, once you setup the POP3 Hotmail account in your Outlook Express you can manipulate the return-address, which is different from the reply-to address

Richard, because you’re using the Web based Hotmail instead of the POP3 access, you are limited to the Hotmail server settings, so it won’t allow you to achieve what you want

And even if above is not workable you can still setup a separate POP3 account for tech@bigchip.com then when you reply the mail received in Hotmail can select this account for the reply

HTH

Cheers,

8

OK, I figured out what Richard is talking about.

  • Configure Hotmail to set the “Reply To” to whatever you want.

  • Send a message from Hotmail to someone.

  • Have that somone hit the reply button to send back to you.

  • Notice that the e-mail is properly replying back to the address you wanted, but in the body of the e-mail the “To” address is still showing you as from Hotmail.

Analsysis: Hotmail will let you set a “Reply To” address, but the “To” information sent out with your e-mail messages is always shown as writing from Hotmail. It is just what they do for promotion’s sake I guess. So, in the end you get to configure the “reply-to” field, but not the “to” field.

9

Jeremy (our Moderator) has now seen the problem, so I imagine that other interested parties now understand the issues involved.

Here is the crux of the matter: In my initial example, the tech@bigchip.com address is being established with all sorts of filtering capability, to keep out viruses, huge attachments, multiple mailings from the same address, etc.

If it is easy for a recipient to “discover” my real hotmail address, then they will be able to bypass this filtering quite easily, and cause me problems if they so want to.

Is there a solution? Or perhaps there is some other email server (besides hotmail) that I should be using? I don’t want the incoming email forwarded to my hinet account, since that is for my personal use.