Wrong account selected to send a new email in Mail

[DaveWT]

My mid-2011 iMac is updated to the latest macOS and Mail versions, but this problem has been seen for previous versions.

I have 4 different email accounts (all IMAP) handled by Mail for various purposes.

I can be in one account, reading new emails in the INBOX and perhaps responding to them. Then I go to write a new email to another recipient, and being a bit careless I hit “SEND” without carefully checking the pulldown box that states which email account this email will be sent from. I would have expected that this email would be sent from the email account that I was just using but often later I found it was actually sent from one of my other accounts, which can be very problematic depending on the circumstances.

Tonight I finally decided to track this down and went to Mail’s Preferences > Composing where I saw a setting for “Send new messages from:” and the pulldown there contained “Automatically select best account”.




The other choices in this pulldown would be to select one particular account to use when sending any email, which I don’t want.




So my question is how does Mail determine how to “Automatically select best account”? It obviously isn't always getting it right. I would have hoped for a choice to “select the account you are in” or something.

 

[chas_m]

I think the confusion is stemming from the use of the words "new messages."

The default behaviour in Mail is to REPLY from the same account the incoming message is addressed to. That's certainly what's happening when I *reply* to a message sent to one of my accounts.

The preference boxes you are dealing with there are for NEW messages (ie not a reply). Typically users WOULD want to choose a default email account from which new messages are sent. This has no effect on how a *reply* is handled at all. "Automatically choose best account" is likely to be attempting to take a NEW message that is addressed to someone who has previously emailed you and look at what account was last (or usually, perhaps) used to address that person in the past, and picking that one. I haven't been able to test this, so consider it a theory.

 

[DaveWT]

Yes, a REPLY is not the problem. If I reply to a received email it is sent from the inbox where that received email (i.e. the account) was received as one would hope.

I just hoped that at that moment if I turned around and created a new email to someone else, say, it would still get sent from this same email account and not somehow switch to one of the other accounts I had not been recently using.

But now I believe which email account will be chosen for such a "new" email might depend on what account I previously used to send to that person or perhaps (and worse) to which account that person previously sent me an email.

The default email setting doesn't work for me because I don't really consider any of my accounts as "default". I might choose to send an email from any of them at any moment depending on my needs.

I guess I just have to be rigorous in checking which account will pop up as the one that the email is about to use to send out the new email.

 

[chas_m]

Another option would be to assign a "default" address for new messages, and then change it only if that's not the one you want to use. Might be easier to remember to do it that way.

 

[DaveWT]

Ah, you are obviously giving more credit to my memory capabilities than is deserved.