How to set the default new message address in Mail.app
Sven-S. Porst is playing 
it cool. While I gush on about the many reasons to love Mail.app, he is more restrained.
He uses Mail, even though it “may not be the best Mail application around” and even though the lozenge icons in Tiger Mail make him “puke over my keyboard just for reading my e-mail”.
One thing annoys him more than anything:
the fact that it automatically sets the sender address for new messages based on the message that is currently selected in your inbox.
This means that he often sends out email from an inappropriate alias.
Luckily, it is easy to stop Mail.app doing this and to set an unchanging default email address for all your new emails.
The option for this can be found in the Composing pane of Mail’s Preferences:
By default, Mail sends new email with the sender’s address drawn from the last mailbox you were viewing. Clicking on the drop-down menu allows you to specify a different email address that Mail will then always use when you compose a new message.
Sven-S. argues that not seeing this option before is Mail’s fault, the result of poor interface design. The “Send new mail from” title for the option is misleading, he says:
So what does that look like? Right, like a feature for people who are using several accounts. But that’s not me. To simplify things, I’m essentially forwarding all the messages from my various accounts to a single place and I’m just querying that one (and the other ones just need to exist because apparently you need to set up a whole account for Mail to be able to use different sender addresses). So all the messages I have in my inbox already live in a single account. And if Mail just used the address associated to that account, everything would be nice and dandy.
Personally, I like the way Mail handles this. More often than not, I want to compose a new message with my work alias when I have been reading work email, from the blog address when reading Hawk Wings emails. But for those with different tastes or email configurations, this tip may prevent you puking on your keyboard.
Tags: accounts, Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, email addresses, interface design, mail.app, sender addressRelated posts
December 6th, 2006 at 12:52 am
“because apparently you need to set up a whole account for Mail to be able to use different sender addresses”
Actually, this is not quite true…. You can simply specify multiple sender addresses in the “E-Mail Address” field of your primary account, separated by commas. When composing an e-mail, you will be able to select whichever address you like from the drop-down list.
Obviously this isn’t a well-documented feature, so I can’t disagree with the comments about it being a poor design, but it does solve the problem of needing multiple accounts to support multiple FROM addresses.
(Incidentally, I’m pretty sure I picked up that tip here on Hawk Wings, BTW :-) ).
Whether or not your outbound mail server actually allows you to send from those addresses is another story, and really has nothing to do with Apple Mail (although you can have multiple outbound SMTP servers for a single account as well).
December 6th, 2006 at 1:01 am
Jesse: Yes, you may well have in an ancient Hawk Wings post.
The view above is not mine, but Sven-S.’s. I like to let people speak for themselves, but in this case, perhaps I should noted that in case people are misled.
December 6th, 2006 at 2:00 am
As far as I can see forwarding to a single place hasn’t ’simplified things’. If you forward to an appropriate mailbox then the reply address is correct. Plus that removes the ‘poor interface design’ allegation because you don’t need to change the Send New Mail From popup. I have four mailboxes: Fastmail (thanks Tim!), two domain names, and my ISP. It works.
December 6th, 2006 at 9:22 am
You’re welcome :)
As you know, I’m a big fan too.
December 6th, 2006 at 10:11 pm
This is one of the feature i don’t like about mail. I manage several accounts (a dozen, perhaps too many and I should discard some accounts). To simplify, I have created smart mailboxes to sort my mail depending on the content and not on the account, but this makes me use the wrong address more often, beacuse I forget to set the right account when I compose a new message.
This is especially annoying when I don’t use the right address for one of my mailing list, so the ml server refuse my mail and i have to resend it.
Or when i’m reading a mailing list and i want to reply in private using my personal account and not my mailing list account.
I’d prefer an option to lock the from address (and maybe the recipient too) depending on the folder i am in or the contact i writing to, so that when I’m in a folder it always send out one address, even if is a smartfolder in which i collect mail from different accounts, or when I’m composing an email the right sender address is automatically set when i choose a contact from the address book.
Hope I made my self clear :-)
December 7th, 2006 at 2:57 am
You did. Locking the From address on a per contact basis is an excellent idea. That would solve the problem, regardless of how anyone set up Apple Mail and mapped their external mailboxes into it.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:32 am
If your each of your account have a different “Full Name” value each new message has a drop down named “Account” where you can chose the account to send from. If after giving diferent “Full Name” to each account you still don’t see this, try the customize on the left drop down and enable the Account drop down.
January 16th, 2008 at 4:38 am
@Marco Lopes
Customize on the left of the compose window does not work. I click on it and see a From which I check. But then the drop down menu is greyed showing the default email address (the one corresponding the the last mail box viewed).
I have 3 email accounts and am using Leopard (apple mail 3.0 I guess). It is a problem I have been struggling with.