Outlook – Change the default From address in Outlook 2010/2013

exchange-2010microsoft-outlook

I have a situation where a customer changed their primary SMTP domain.

Some users have send as rights to various mailboxes so they have the From: button displayed.
The From button displays the old primary address due to the profiles having been set up long before the address change took place.

The change was from name@old-ddmmain.com to name@new-domain.com

I'm hoping there's a registry entry that will allow a change for that email address to the new one, without having to create a new outlook profile.

The environment is Exchange 2010 SP3, clients are Outlook 2010.

Best Answer

I don't have the same environment as you (Office 365 and Outlook 2013), so I will provide the steps I used to retrieve my answer. Your mileage may vary along with the usual caveats about the dangers of changing values in the registry directly versus using the application.

The change the e-mail name from Outlook 2013, I go to:

File > Account Settings
Select Account Settings from dropdown
In Email tab, go to More Settings
Change the e-mail name.

In my example, I added 01234567890 to my e-mail. You can see when I create a New Email, the name is appended with the numbers. This does not change the actual FROM e-mail Outlook 2013, but just the name.

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For this sequence, I used Process Monitor from SysInternals (procmon) to monitor the file and registry activity where the process name contains outlook and category is write:

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For me, I found that when I changed the e-mail address to the new value, this registry changed:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\Profiles\Outlook\fc9a8ceae2b34f449fc525e570d01fcf

001f6620 = name@new-domain.com (Type = REG_BINARY)

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Since you are using Outlook 2010, the registry path will be different, especially the 15.0 part.

Please be careful with remote registry changes. Always test first.

A solution using VBA:

Copy this simple VBA procedure into an Outlook VBA project :

Sub ChangeSenderName(itm As MailItem)

    itm.SentOnBehalfOfName = "Joe TextsTooMuch"
    itm.Save

End Sub

Now create an Outlook rule that checks for incoming emails from 0123456789@mms.att.net. I suggest using the condition called 'with specific words in the sender's address'.

Then for the rule action, select 'run a script'. Set the value to the script called ChangeSenderName.

Once you have saved and enabled this rule, any incoming email that matches the sender address will be passed to the VBA code, which will modify it.

Notes on this solution

This code is actually modifying a field called SentOnBehalfOfName. As a result, it only appears to take effect in the Outlook Message View - not when you open up an individual email. I looked into changing the actual sender field, but it is not able to be modified with VBA.

Alternative solutions

Of course, the most elegant way to do this would be to configure the service that is sending the emails, but I am assuming you have no control over that.

Another option is to configure the mail server which receives the emails, to modify the From header before it delivers to your copy of Outlook.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Outlook – Set ‘From’ address in Outlook on a per-message basis

Outlook – How get Outlook 2010 to display a name instead of an email address for mail I receive

A solution using VBA:

Notes on this solution

Alternative solutions

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