The only way to set up multiple identities with modest is to set up multiple accounts. If you have a single inbox with multiple send addresses then this is annoying as you need to modify the account email address each time you want to use a different "from" address.

This work around creates an account for each address you want to be able to send from and uses a fake pop3 server on your n900 as a receive account, which obviously does nothing except stop the errors that you get when you put dummy details into the account settings.

It uses the "socat" application to set up the fake pop3 server, so you'll need to install this with an application manager or apt-get
Here is the setup for the socat daemon which will set up the fake pop3 server, which should be saved as /etc/event.d/pop
So all this is doing is setting up a listener on port 10110 and if anything is sent on this port, it will respond with "+OK". This appears to be enough to satisfy modest when it checks the account with pop3. This will be run when hildon-desktop starts, so either reboot, or run it from the command line to get it started initially:


So to set up an identity in modest, create a new account, use the email and name you want for the identity. The pop3 credentials can be anything. Don't use secure connection, and set the server IP to 127.0.0.1

The SMTP details will have to be genuine so you can send using this account.

On the last page of the setup, select Advanced and change the pop3 address to 10110.

You may want to give the identity accounts a name beginning with 'z' so that they appear last in the account list.

And thats it. No errors when modest does its checks, and you can select the address from the drop down when creating a new message.

Paul

Ingenious

brilliant, though once more sheds some light on modest shortcomings.
You should create a pkg for it :-)

Apt does not find socat. I shoud propably add some repo to my N900..?

Yes, I think it is in 'extras'.

Nope, extras-devel & extras-testing only. The community decided it was too technical/geeky/non-gui to even be presented to users at the time. Things beaome a bit saner eventually, but in the meantime the maintainer got fed up so it's stuck there unless/until someone else picks it up.

Keep in mind that the "socat" line in the original post should all be on one line. The formatting on the page is wrapping the command, which makes it appear to be two lines.

Is this approach still the best option, given the progress being made with modest?

I have been using it for several months now with only the occasional glitch, but it would be great to switch to something less hacky.

I have spent considerable time lately searching for good solutions to this problem, and my research has shown this to still be the best solution. A clever solution it is indeed, for which I commend you

Awesome, ingenious solution, I thought it couldn't be done...

Thanks a lot...