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obdave

macrumors member
Original poster
May 25, 2008
63
5
OK, here's a Mail question.

I have ten different email accounts that Mail accesses. (When I was using Eudora these were called "Personalities"). I have that many email addresses because I wear a couple different consulting hats, I play in a couple different bands, and pretty soon it all adds up to ten email accounts. Such is my life. Mail all handles it reasonably well. As did Eudora.

A year later, here's the thing I keep tripping over, and I hope somebody here can help me.

Mail has a feature where, when you send a new message, it uses the last account that you used. If you're replying to an email you just read which was sent to Account D, the reply by default comes from the Account D email address. This is good.

If, however, you read a message from Account D, then go off and get a cup off coffee, and maybe do something else, then some time later compose a new email message, that message also comes from Account D by default. I would argue this is bad. Sometimes I catch this, but sometimes I don't, and I'll inadvertently send somebody an email message from the wrong account.

I would like to keep the "reply" behavior the same, but for new messages I would like to set a default account rather than have it use the last account I happened to read from.

Is this possible?

Thanks in advance.
 
Yes you can.
Mail -> Preferences -> Composing
there is an option there to send new email from a specific email account. Choose the preferred email account.
 
You can only set a 'default' send from selected account from the settings menu. Part from that, it will use which ever inbox you are in when you click the reply button. If you are not in a inbox folder then it will use your default settings.

I have the same problems when I'm running around and forget to double check.
 
Yes you can.
Mail -> Preferences -> Composing
there is an option there to send new email from a specific email account. Choose the preferred email account.

Awesome! Why didn't I find this? This is exactly what I was looking for and it has exactly the behavior I wanted as described above.

Thanks very much!
 
Also, if you have an iphone/ipod touch the mail app uses the same setup. But you need change the setting in the iphone mail settings to do it.
 
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