Canonical Address

[Bill Brock]

When setting up a user, there is a field on the first page labeled Canonical Address.

What is it and what is it used for?

[mmorse]

The canonical address displays in the 'From:" field of messages that are sent.

So say your user account is: last@domain.com

You could have a canonical to make it permanently look like mail is coming from: first.last@domain.com

To take the place of a fixed canonical address you can also user mail identities (in the option tab of each user) so the user can select when they want to appear as first.last@domain.com or first.m.last@domain.com or just last@domain.com
Mail Identities are for appearing to be signed in to another service-So from zimbra you could send mail as user@gmail.com without switching clients/browsers/etc.
However that would only take care of sending, you would need an alias to receive mail at first.m.last@domain.com or first.last@domain.com.


You can have some interesting setup's domain wide as well:
ManagingDomains - ZimbraWiki