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Macheleon is a Virtual Identity Manager for Apple Mail implemented as an SMTP relay. Say you have five different email accounts, each used for some specific purpose (work, family, spam honeypot, etc). Now when you send outgoing messages, you want to make sure that your address (From address) in these messages is the right one. There are some existing ways to accomplish this:

• Create an account in Apple Mail for each address and use the drop down menu, while composing messages, to choose the appropriate From address.
• Use only one account (assuming you are forwarding mail from the others into that one) and in the configuration (preferences) for that account, list all your email addresses as a comma separated list.
• Switch to using Thunderbird which supports multiple identities for mail accounts (but does not yet support AddressBook integration, etc).

Macheleon provides a few advantages (and also disadvantages — see the Bug/Feature list) over these approaches:

• Especially if you aggregate all your email into one mailbox, you no longer need to configure Apple Mail with dummy accounts for each identity.
• Macheleon lets you configure the From address and SMTP gateway for each message, but the real neat thing is that it remembers this configuration. Future messages to these recipients will be automatically have the From address rewritten to the preferred one and sent out using the specified gateway.
• If you use a mail server like Qmail, Courier or Postfix and the extension addressses feature (in short: the ability to create and use your...@yourdomain.com type addresses on the fly, which are useful as one-use/throw-away email addresses), Macheleon lets you generate mail with these addresses easily, without having to reconfigure your mail system.
• Despite its description, there is nothing preventing you from using it with any mail reader, including Thunderbird, Opera, etc.

See the FAQ (link above) for more information, including installation and usage information.