Reordering Mail accounts

Haven't tried it on ML, but on Lion you can go to Mail > Preferences > Accounts > Account Information and rearrange them in the Email Address field.

Actually I stumbled upon how to do it after reading this thread - in the main Mail window, with the mailbox column open on the left side, just drag and reorder the mail accounts, just like you would reorder the hard drives and folders in the Finder.

Unfortunately that doesn't reorder the "From" address list when creating a new mail. That was actually my connection to attimas question/problem.

I have 6 different mail-accounts (private and work) and some of theme also have aliases. The from-list is ordered according to the order of accounts in the mail settings which can't be changed since upgrade to ML :-(

First thought it doesn't work but I needed to restart the Mail.app after reordering the accounts like Raine2jz told.

Then the "from"-list got reordered too!

So thank you very much! Think you should mark the discussion as "solved"... 🙂

Yes, I forgot to mention the "restart" part... but I don't usually leave my Mail app open all day, I just open the app when I check my mail then close it, so a restart is inevitible =)

for me every time i'm changing a account setting in preference , the order go back to where it was..

i need to rearrange every time i do a change in prefrence.

never had this probleme before montain.

I think the trick here is to get your email preferences/settings all setup first, then rearrange the account orders in the main window. And don't forget to restart Mail after reordering the accounts.

i have a second probleme,,my compagny imap mail, stop syncing evrytime the computer go to sleep,

the connection stop with the server.. they only way i fund is to unclick the SSL, change de port...and everything is back to normal...until next time computer sleep..

then i clic the SSL angain..

but everytime i do that..account order change also..

i have the same problem on my macbook pro and imac. since Montain Lion.

but i had this same issue long long time ago with Lion.

my Gmail account are going ok.

You can reorder mail account by moving each mail folder up or down in the mail program. Now the annoying part is that once you open mail preference and change anything then you loose the reordering and you will to move folder up and down again. I agree that when the screen saver is on, all the email is offline. So not sure how to disable this feature and disable the fact that you loose the reordering of mail account.

This works! But you need to restart Mail after reordering the accounts. Thanks!

For me in plain Lion, I can re-order the accounts in the sidebar by dragging them as indicated. But as others point out, anytime I close Mail.app (which I have to frequently because it leaks memory and causes CPU spikes), the ordering is lost. This is a real hassle for me to file messages because I have numerous accounts, and the one I use all day every day is pushed to the bottom by default.

I did find a fix, however, if you are comfortable manually editing your preferences.

If you open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist, under the root node there is an item called "MailSections." This lists all your sidebar items. Say you are editing this file in Xcode, you can drag these in any order you like. You can even place a mailbox above your inboxes. Save the preferences after re-ordering the entries, and your sidebar will retain the new default order.

Cthulhu wrote:

. . .

If you open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist,

That's not where Mail preferences are on Mountain Lion (and this thread is in the Mountain Lion forum).

They're in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Preferences/com.apple.Mail.plist

Thus this technique may not work on Mountain Lion, even when you have the right file.

Hence the first part of my post :-)

I would be interested in anyone's experience in Mountain Lion. A few dozen of us here at work were looking for a solution, but we are on Lion and not considering upgrading until January or February.

If the preferences editing works in both places, I or someone else could perhaps provide a simple script to do it. I would, however, need some help from a ML user to get it working for all of us on both versions. Might help a lot of people, since Google brings us here for a solution.