feature request: add multiple identities, not just aliases

[zmberber]

The way accounts.email.accounts works with multiple identities, is that you can set aliases, which are just different email addresses that you can send from and receive for the same account.

However, the way I (and I assume most people) use identities, is that these are not merely other email addresses, but also other names with different signatures.

For example, I might have an account [email protected], which is my fallback account, where all messages with recipient being a non-defined @example.com address go to, and where the mailserver allows me to change the sender address. So I might get an email to [email protected] or [email protected], for weird online shops ore one-time contact with certain people, where I registered with those email addresses. I want to be able to write/reply as each of these, with different signatures and sender names (e.g. a pseudonym in one case, and Dr. something, something consultant in the other case or whatever).

This is all possible to make use of in Thunderbird. Thunderbird has identities that can be configured independently. Sadly, the home-manager module just does everything perIdentitySettings, where an identity is set up for every alias of an account, and all relevant settings are mirrored from the standard configuration.

Related issues: #5010 #6177

[zmberber]

I should be able to actually write this feature myself into home-manager, I just want to hear your opinion. I am thinking of an extra identities option for an account. Not sure what to do with the aliases option, maybe the two options can live in parallel, and be mutually exclusive or something.

I would then also adjust perIdentitySettings to only apply to all non-pre-configured settings for a given identity.

[teto]

thanks for detailing your usecase, which makes sense. I think it's ok to support this but dont go overboard: the complexity of the configuration should not increase for someone not using this. For instance new identities(/aliases if aliases get replaced with "identities") could just copy the default one, or have empty defaults.

[zmberber]

The idea would of course be to implement all of this in such a way that if you don't use this, it won't change anything else.