Mail bug in Mountain Lion

I just installed Mountain Lion after using Lion and had all SORTS of problems with Mail application (freezing, deleted emails would reappear, crashing, etc. etc.). I called Apple Support and they told me to do this, and it works:

shut down

then turn on computer while holding command R

when OS Utilities window comes up go to the top menu bar and click Utilities, then Terminal.

type (all one word, lower case): reset password

hit return

go to the bottom of the reset password window that comes up,

select the HD

then click the Reset button at the bottom under "Reset Home Folder Permission and ACLs"

then wait for it to finish

click the red button to close the finder.

then go to Terminal at top,

Quit Terminal.

Then restart under the apple logo icon.

...This resets the Permissions for all the applications in your computer and refreshes a lot of things that cause bugs, they say....

I just installed Mountain Lion after using Lion and had all SORTS of problems with Mail application (freezing, deleted emails would reappear, crashing, etc. etc.). I called Apple Support and they told me to do this, and it works:

shut down

then turn on computer while holding command R

when OS Utilities window comes up go to the top menu bar and click Utilities, then Terminal.

type (all one word, lower case): reset password

hit return

go to the bottom of the reset password window that comes up,

select the HD

then click the Reset button at the bottom under "Reset Home Folder Permission and ACLs"

then wait for it to finish

click the red button to close the finder.

then go to Terminal at top,

Quit Terminal.

Then restart under the apple logo icon.

...This resets the Permissions for all the applications in your computer and refreshes a lot of things that cause bugs, they say....

For Tuttle: I am a little confused. I think the problem is reproducible, it's just not encountered by everyone, because not everyone forwards multiple email addresses to a single email account with the expectation of being able to respond from the original email address. This was seamlessly possible in Lion. Now it's not as far as I and other posters here can tell.

Are you saying that you are engaging in the behavior others are--forwarding multiple email accounts to a single email inbox--but you can still respond by default from the originating email address? If that's what you are saying, that's great news because that means that it's not a system-wide issue.

Or are you saying that you are not encountering the problem because you are not trying to engage in the behavior?

Can you clarify?

forwards multiple email addresses to a single email account

That's not the OP's issue. Have you even read his first two posts here?

Yes I've read the entire thread carefully.

It's a variation of the issue, as YakkoW explained above. Whether the mail is moved automatically or manually to a different folder or inbox than the inbox to which it was sent, the issue is the same. Under Lion, Mail would use the email address to which the email was sent to generate the reply. Now it's decision about which email address to use for the reply is affected by where the mail is located, not to which address the email was sent.

Desertmac is correct. That is the EXACT issue with which we are dealing. Pre-Mountain Lion, the default was for Mail to set the reply-from address to the address to which the received e-mail was sent. Thus, is an e-mail was sent to name@domain.com, then the reply would be sent from name@domain.com. This would happen REGARDLESS of where the e-mail was moved. So, if that e-mail was moved (either manually or via rules) to, say, the iCloud inbox, then the reply-form would remain name@domain.com.

That is not working in Mountain Lion. The reply-from is defaulting to the inbox where the e-mail resides, whether it was moved there or received there.

I hope this all makes sense. Now, we just need to discover whether this is a bug in ML or whether Apple considers this a "feature."

T.

Tuttle: This is not necessarily a bug, but a flaw. It is 100% reproducible with the workflow many users have. Personally, I receive to multiple e-mail addresses through a single inbox because they are collected through a single gmail account (for several practical reasons). With Lion, when you click "reply", it replies from the address that the e-mail was sent to, regardless. With Mountain Lion, it defaults to the inbox e-mail, something that is unacceptable.

This cannot be changed in settings or anything. The only option, is to create multiple inboxes and use rules, but it is not an option for me to spread my e-mails into multiple inboxes. Neither can I use the global inbox, because this contains e-mails and notiofications from multiple separate business projects that I do not wish to assess simultaneously.

This is a move from Apple that they did not consider properly.

Yes I agree that this is a problem.

Under Lion I used a number of accounts, and when replying I want to make sure the email I send from is the one that I originally used. It worked well.

Now it seems that I will have to seperate the different emails into different folders? i do not see this as moving forwards. We have had a very good feature removed. I am not even sure that I can do it as I use iClout to share my emails between Macs, so I can send from any Mac.

So every email I now send I have to change the From box.

I send a lot of emails, and this is very a frustrating behaviour.

+1

This is a bad design decision, if intentional. I use a Smart Mailbox as my Inbox, since it can gather unread email from all accounts, combine with flagged mail I still need to handle, etc. But now, every reply I make from this mailbox is being sent by my main account, no matter on which email address it arrived. With both business and personal email coming in, this is a problem.

suncat100 wrote:

Tuttle: This is not necessarily a bug, but a flaw. It is 100% reproducible with the workflow many users have. Personally, I receive to multiple e-mail addresses through a single inbox because they are collected through a single gmail account

...

This is a move from Apple that they did not consider properly.

Perhaps they didn't intend it to work that way. If we can't make it happen, maybe they couldn't either. If you'd like it to be fixed, you will have to do the work required as we can't reproduce the behavior in order to properly report it.

The Apple Software Engineers don't monitor this site (or really anybody at Apple, except the moderators, but not for bug reports or enhancement requests).

If you can reproduce it, write down the steps that are required and file a bug report with Apple. You can dump it to the Feedback site or you can sign up for a free Apple Developer Center account and file it there (much better option).

Perhaps they didn't intend it to work that way? You mean when I receive an email to me@my.com, I am supposed to reply from other@else.com although that is not the recipient? You mean that although this was working 100% correctly in Lion, it was specifically fixed to not work in Mountain Lion? k. I am aware this is a discussion forum and not a channel for officially reporting bugs btw.

Its easy to reproduce: Just add a gmail account that receives e-mails from multiple accounts. No hocus pocus.

I just tried this on my MBA, but it didn't work.

I an iMac on which I just have exchange email setup and it is now working fine after following steps -

1. Deleted the account from the setting (mail, calender, address book, etc)

2. Deleted the exchange account related items in the keychain.

3. Setup the account again.

It took a while but then it started working fine and syncs immediately.

I did the same steps on MBA but it did not work. I erased the harddrive and did a fresh instal of ML. Then setup the mail accounts. On MBA I have exchange plus, icloud and yahoo emails also setup. I don't know if having multiple accounts causing probelm because iMac with just the exchange account is working fine.

The other two mail accounts are fine on MBA but exchange account is having problems. Inbox disappears. Mail program hangs when I try to quit. Sync is an issue. But strangely all the folders on the exchange account are downloaded and appearing fine. So I guess the probelm is mainly with the inbox.

No, I meant, in response to, "This is a move from Apple that they did not consider properly," that they didn't intend to reply to the wrong address. You seem to assume they programmed it to work that way.

A lot of Mail was changed from Lion. It doesn't take much for something to creep into the code and muck it up.

Its easy to reproduce: Just add a gmail account that receives e-mails from multiple accounts. No hocus pocus.

I have no idea what that means. Sounds quite a bit like hocus pocus. I have no idea how I can add a gmail account that receives e-mails from multiple accounts. Are you talking about having gmail go out and collect email from other POP accounts, or something like that? I have multiple accounts that receive email from the one account (ok two, in one case).

I have two gmail accounts, one main gmail and one with another address through a school. I get emails through four different servers (three if you combine the two gmail, and two different email addresses for one of the servers), and when I reply, it always uses the account the original email was sent to.

Barney,

Many of us have multiple e-mail accounts, usually POP3 accounts. In order to sync our e-mails across multiple computers, we configure e-mail rules that move the e-mails from the inbox that received them to an account that will sync across machines, such as Google accounts or iCloud.

That's it. No "hocus-pocus." It's just a very convenient way to sync e-mails on machines or store e-mails in the cloud.

T.

Basically, yes collect from multiple POP accounts. For those that are curious, allow me to explain. Lets just say I have one "project", and for this project, I have multiple e-mails admin@project.com, serveradmin@project.com, myname@project.com, newsletter@project.com, info@project.com ... also, there are multiple domains in our project, making it myname@relatedproject.com ... and so on ...

I do not wish to create and manage an inbox for each e-mail address in my mail app. For this reason, I collect multiple POP mails in a single Gmail account. Additional benefits? Gmail has by far the best anti-spam measures, and I can also access my e-mails through browser.

So, all these related e-mails arrive in my mail app from a single gmail account, in the same inbox, just how I want it. If I receive an e-mail to me@project.com, I want to reply from me@project.com (yes, I have added the SMTP), and this worked flawlessly prior to latest update (why shouldnt it? It is normal to reply from the e-mail address that the e-mail is sent to). However, it seems Apple believes that I always want to reply from the e-mail of the inbox, instead of the e-mail recipient. Nope.