When replying to email, Apple Mail changing the sending email address. Why? How to prevent this?

Did you check your setting in Mail Preferences:

"If you want to use the same From address for all your messages, choose

Mail > Preferences, click Composing, click the “Send new messages

from” pop-up menu, then choose an email account. Or choose instead to

have Mail automatically select the best address, based on the email

address of the first recipient in your message, as well as the currently

selected mailbox and message."

Address emails in Mail on Mac - Apple Support

(under the heading "Set your From email address")

"select best account" should be called "select email address that is on the email I am replying to account",that is what it's supposed to do.

Just an addition: I've had the same problem for a long time.

Setting

"If you want to use the same From address for all your messages, choose

Mail > Preferences, click Composing, click the “Send new messages

from” pop-up menu, then choose an email account...."

This setting works for a while then mysteriously changes to "select best address" after a few months.

I have to keep resetting it.



Do OS updates sometime zap this setting?

Sylvia205 wrote:

It is marked as "select best account." But I am them confused by the remainder of your response. What would the address of the "first recipient" have to do with selecting the best SENDING account? It seems that would produce wildly random results having nothing to do with message's original recipient and now the sending. In practice it seems to be choosing a different sending email that doesn't work and can't be sent. So, what am I missing in your reply?

If you have selected "select best account" it will choose different accounts for different replies. If you want it to use the same one each time, change your selection in the preferences.

The quoted answer is from Apple's own documentation. The use of the recipient email to choose an ongoing email server would be, for example, choosing your gmail.com outgoing server to send to a gmail.com recipient.

Yes, they could improve it a bit, take care my friend!:_

OS Updates have been known to change default preferences... yes.