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. mail.app, apple mail, tips, sender address, email addresses, accounts, interface design

Automated Workflows provides an AppleScript that quickly enables or disables Mail.app accounts.

It’s much quicker than hacking through the Accounts pane of Apple Mail’s Preferences. Obviously, the more accounts you have, the more useful the script could be.

Install it by dropping the script into your Mail Script folder (I put mine into ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail).

You can then activate it from the AppleScript menu. The script presents you with a dialog box listing all your mail accounts. Select multiple accounts by holding down the Command key and clicking on the ones you want.

Enable|Disable Accounts is freeware and available from Automated Workflows’ web site.