Mail bug in Mountain Lion

To clarify, my situation has absolutely nothing to do with rules. I keep the majority of my emails contained within their original mailbox (they are not moved). But like the original poster, if I create a *new* email, even with the "Send new messages from account of selected mailbox" preference selected, it automatically sends the email from the first account in my mail accounts list...NOT the address of the whatever email that is currently selected in the inbox, as it always has previously up through Lion.

If you open up the Inbox (click the triangle on the left), and click on one of the account's mailboxes, you will find that New Message does use the default account. However, you are correct that if you don't do that, it does not deafult to the account of the mailbox the message is actually in, but rather to the default account.

So this is, actually, exactly the same bug. Mail ignores the currently selected *message* and only uses the currently selected *mailbox* when deciding what account to use by default. (In your case, the selected mailbox is the "uber-inbox", not the inbox of the message you are viewing.)

You are muddying the water here, imo.

Here's the thread for the problem regarding "to" and "from" not being the same, ie. the other problem than the "Send new messages as"-problem:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4143652?start=0&tstart=0

So seems like there may be two different, but extremely related isssues going on. I cannot report a bug, because when I tried the url given in this thread, it is apparently for developers only. If any of you developers can reproduce my issue, it would be wonderful if you could submit a bug report on our behalf! Thanks. I sure hope they come up with a fix for both of our issues. I can feel your frustrations.

Done! Bug 12038482

Summary:

In previous versions, if you create a new message or a reply, while looking at a message, the default sender of the new message would be the account on which the message being viewed was created. Now, the default sender for new messages is always the account of the mailbox selected on the left panel. When the mailbox selected is a user-created folder, or is the "uber-inbox", then the default is always the first inbox in the list.

Steps to Reproduce:

Create two accounts, A and B.

Receive mail on both accounts.

Make sure the "uber-inbox" is selected, not any individual mailbox

View a message received on account A, create a new message.

View a message received on account B, create a new message.

Expected Results:

The new message created when viewing a message from account A should be from account A.

The new message created when viewing a message from account B should be from account B.

Actual Results:

Both message will be from the same account (whichever is the first inbox in the uber-inbox, apparently).

Regression:

Lion was smart enough to look at the currently selected message. Mountain Lion ignores the current message and only looks at the current mailbox.

Notes:

The behavior when replying is correct. It is only when creating a new message, that the defect arises.

This bug is similar to 12025786, however it differs in that in that other report, even replies do not select the correct account.

Thank you SO very much, jesmith. You explained the new message issue perfectly. I really, really appreciate your taking the time to submit that.

Glad to help, but don't get your hopes up. I have a bug report from 2006 that is still "Open" and has never been investigated. Some of the groups inside Apple jump on bug reports like rabid dogs, but most of them seem to ignore the bug database entirely. I've never reported a bug against Mail before, so I don't know what to expect.

Tuttle wrote:

I can't think of any reason why Apple would have intended this behavior

You can call it "dumbing down" or the further "iOSification" of OS X, but it would seem that if a user moves a mail message from one account to another, then Mail thinks that that move means that the user actually wants that message associated with the latter account (although Mail gives the user an opportunity to change the Reply To [Sent from] address back to the original, receiving account—or any other account—in every message).

I am not moving it under a different account... I am using filters to place the email is folders based on content/sender ID or some other categorical reason. It's how I have been organizing my email for over 30 years of computing... now suddendly Apple has decided that how I (and apparently a lot of people) do it is wrong? I'm not buying that. It's a bug, plain and simple... this is evident by the fact that Apple accepted the first bug report and flagged the second as a duplicate... clearly there's something wrong here, and it's not that we're doing it wrong.

Jobs' famous "you're holding it wrong" didn't work with antenna-gate, and it won't work here.

It's a bug, plain and simple... this is evident by the fact that Apple accepted the first bug report and flagged the second as a duplicate

It may be a bug(s), and it may not be a bug(s).

More often than you may think, bug reports are accepted and ultimately responded to with "Engineering has determined that [this] works as intended," so we'll see how it all turns out in 10.8.1 or later.

I just called Apple support and spoke with a senior support tech for the Mail product who was able to confirm/reproducte the error that I am having... and said that it would be escalated and investigated.

I reported (and she was able to reproduce):

Receive mail in account 1. If the mail is in the inbox, clicking REPLY will populate the FROM field in the reply with the same email address that the original email was sent TO. This is true whether the original email is left in the inbox OR if it's moved from the oringinal inbox and then manually moved back.

However, if the original email is NO LONGER in the inbox (it's been moved to different mailbox by a rule, or manually), clicking REPLY may fill the FROM fields in the reply with a different email address based on the setting of the Mail/Preferences/Composing/Send New Messages From field - either a specific email address or the "Account of selected mailbox".

jesmith wrote:

if a user moves a mail message from one account to another, then Mail thinks that that move means that the user actually wants that message associated with the latter account

Well, no. When you create folder "ON MY MAC" there is no way to associate them with an account. Actually, if I *could* associate a folder with an account, then that would probably solve my problem, since I'd associate it with the account on which I always receive those emails.

But what's happening here is mail is putting them into a folder, which cannot be associated with an account, and therefore the replies will *always* go to the default account. That is not a feature. That is a bug.

AND, if you move the email back to the inbox, it works exactly as it should (and did under Lion). No account associations are broken, but there is just a bug in the way Mail handles REPLIES.

My god this whole thread is going on for much longer than necessary! Jaysus, I've had to stop email notifications because of this ridiculous bickering about seems to be a pretty straightforward issue! After upgrading, Mail has gone squiffy. Maybe if we pray hard enough to the Apple gods, they'll fix it for us! Maybe not. FFS!

Thanks Jerome, you explained very clearly what's going on and I completely agree with you. I consider myself a power user as well which is finding difficulty with this regression in Mountain Lion.

You can call it "dumbing down" or the further "iOSification" of OS X, but it would seem that if a user moves a mail message from one account to another, then Mail thinks that that move means that the user actually wants that message associated with the latter account (although Mail gives the user an opportunity to change the Reply To [Sent from] address back to the original, receiving account—or any other account—in every message).

It's bad behavior, and the reason isn't "iOSification" or the such. It's bad because:

1) It's an unexpected, unannounced, and (for many users) inconvenient change from all previous versions of Mail – with no option for reverting to the previous behavior that we've been using for 10+ years.

2) ML Mail is not only inconsistent with previous versions of Mail, it's inconsistent with itself. ML Mail seems to handle replies one way if the message is in an Inbox; another way if it's in another folder. Yet many users don't want to have to think about where the message lies; they just want to send a reply, and have the reply sent reliably from the account that the recipient would naturally expect it to come from.

I receive messages from many mail accounts (multiple work projects, web dev projects, etc.), and typically move the messages into GTD-style folders like "Needs reply" or "Defer" or some such. Sometimes I reply directly from the Inbox, sometimes from one of the above folders. The replies were consistently sent from the receiving account through all versions of OS X through Lion; now, it's higgledypiggledy and I have to carefully check each message's outgoing account to make sure it's going out from the account that received it. Bleah.

I have no argument with the new behavior as an option for those who for some reason want it, but "option" has to be the key here!

About the new behavior, I could understand that if there was a use case for it. But why would any users, even iOS users, want this new behavior? I think that if you don't use Rules, you're not affected. But is there any way that this new behavior is an advantage?

I don't have an iOS device. Does Mail on iOS work like the new behavior if you use Rules on iOS?

I may have to revert to the old version unless they fix this soon.

Just as frustrating is if you use different signatures for different accounts you have to manually delete the old signature after switching to the new email account.

This is a very Microsoft-style problem for Apple. I may be insulting Entourage though....😉