There have been many questions about the Star Wars e-mail address ever since the feature was first introduced along with the rest of Hyperspace, in its initial incarnation.

Just to be clear, it's not a fully functional e-mail service, like Hotmail and the like. It's more of an e-mail forwarding service. Meaning that e-mails sent to the Star Wars address are forwarded to the real e-mail address that's linked to a Lucas Online account. An account on this site will work on IndianaJones.com too, as well as on LucasArts.com. That's why I refer to it as a Lucas Online account.

Anyhoo, forwarding service. The neat aspect of the e-mail address is of course the appearance. A Star Wars address can look pretty cool.



You can give people the address and they can send messages to it. You can also send people messages and have them look like they're coming from the Star Wars address. And that's what this blog entry is all about.

I have to disagree with the tip on the SW Email tab of the account management section. (You activate and change the address there by the way.) Using the SW address as reply-to address is risky. What often happens is that the Star Wars domain, the part after the @, gets changed somehow, to email1.starwars.com. So if people reply, the message gets sent to that domain, not the actual domain of your address. And that's when a message simply disappears. I don't think I've ever read about failed delivery notifications. So the sender assumes the message was delivered. I think you'll agree with me that you shouldn't follow that advice.

What you could do and what I've been successfully doing, we'll come to that in a moment, but first a note about security and privacy. A reply to a mail sent to your vanity address will most likely reveal your log-in address, if you attach your vanity address to the address used to log in on Lucas Online websites. If you don't want that, then use a different address.

Okay, if you like security and/or privacy, then you now have two real addresses to work with. One to log in and receive forwarded e-mails and another to handle replies. (In my case the latter is my main e-mail account. It's also the default account in OE, so it is used by default when I reply to a mail, even if that mail was delivered to a diffferent address...) Either way, programs like Outlook Express and Thunderbird really give you the most freedom.

Three fields/settings/things you can change:
- A name: pick something, anything, your screen name, whatever

- An address: your Star Wars address

- A reply address: a real e-mail address

In OE, go to Tools > Accounts, then select an account and click on Properties. On the General tab, look for the Name, E-mail address and Reply Address fields. I'm not sure how it works in other programs, like Mozilla's e-mail client, but I assume it's very similar.

And that's the key to success! This way it looks like mail is coming from your Star Wars address, but replies are sent to a real address and thus don't get lost due to the email1.starwars.com bug.



A couple of weeks later, another update...

The aformentioned bug only rears its ugly head when a message passes through LFL's servers. So in other words, if you send a mail, with your vanity address as address or as reply address, to another vanity address. If you send that same mail to a regular address, nothing happens. I thought this was worth noting.

A couple of years later, another update...

What is also worth noting, is that all vanity e-mail traffic gets filtered for spam. You can not disable this nor change any settings. Customer Service has reassured me though that no personal emails should be getting filtered out, but no spam filter is infallible, so beware!