Using Mailbox Identities

Updated Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Introduction

In the Migadu admin panel, under the mailboxes section, we have a functionality named Identities. While not so intuitive, identities are very useful. Here are some use cases where you should consider identities.

Shared Mailboxes

Sometimes several people will work on a same mailbox. We do so ourselves when handling the Migadu support email. However, we do not want to share the same mailbox credentials. This is where identities come to rescue.

Each of us has an own identity for the Migadu support mailbox. In case someone’s password leaks out, we need to change password only for the leaked account.

Application Specific Passwords

It is normal today to access emails from multiple devices even at the same time. If one of our devices however gets stolen or gets compromised, we would have to change all our accounts’ passwords to disable accesses. This would mean also re-configuring all other devices.

With application specific passwords we can have a separate credentials pair for each device, for example john_iphone@doe.com , john_mac@doe.com , john_gmail@doe.com . These are again mailbox identities.

To make things even more interesting, just as with mailboxes, you can limit identities to specific services, e.g. POP, IMAP, ManageSieve.

Sending Identities

By default, each mailbox may send messages only as self (we are referring to the From header). However, for individuals or small teams it may be more convenient to use a single, own mailbox from which they can send as other personas on the domain as needed. A good example could be billing@, info@, contact@ addresses.

Mailbox identities help us here too as they extend the sending identities. In this case, the password of the identity is irrelevant and does not have to be used.