Mail bug in Mountain Lion

I can confirm the behavior as you have expressed it, and as some have correctly pointed out, it has nothing to do with the SMTP selection or setup.

I have compared the behavior between Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion. In the former, in an On My Mac mailbox where messages have moved to, selecting a message and then Reply will offer the From of the original account. In ML it only offers the default for new message which I believe is the addy of the first account listed.

In a Smart Mailbox, the behavior is correct, since in the Smart Mailbox there is only a reference to a message that still exists in the origin Inbox. But were you to open a Smart Mailbox without any message selected, a New Message will be from the default account, whereas with any Inbox, even if no message is selected, it will be the addy of the account associated with that Inbox.

There are a lot of behaviors tossed into this topic that may not belong in it, but your description is the proper one to discuss. A more recent post about the behavior when two or more addresses that are on the computer are all in the distribution list is not related. For several versions, going back at least to Leopard, Mail picks the first one of those addresses that appears in the distribution list to tag as the From in the Reply. Annoying, but not a change in Mountain Lion.

Ernie

Also, at least for me, this behavior exists when I attempt to reply to emails from the Unified Inbox.

(Which, as many people have pointed out, worked just fine in previous iterations of OSX; proving again that either we're ineffectively communicating the problem, or someone just doesn't know what he is talking about).

Wayne,

I cannot replicate this. Chosing any message from the blended Inbox, and clicking Reply results in the correct From address being offered.

Ernie

Huh. Oddly, it's working for me now. Maybe I'm going utterly co-co for cocoa puffs.

Or maybe I'm confusing "new" mail.

Previously, when in the Unified Inbox, if you hit Command-N to start a new email, it auto-set the From account to be the account of the email that was highlighted. That behavior seems to be different now.

Previously, when in the Unified Inbox, if you hit Command-N to start a new email, it auto-set the From account to be the account of the email that was highlighted. That behavior seems to be different now.

I will have to test that -- however, I believe I already found that to be the case with a Smart Mailbox, which is another form of blended mailbox, with respect to a New Message.

Ernie

Ernie, I can replicate the issue I believe Wayne is having, and I explained it in a bit more detail here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4148125?answerId=19102145022#19102145022

Essentially, the issue is that if one inbox is receiving emails from multiple accounts (due to using an email alias, for instance), the "From" address chosen is the one that matches the inbox rather than the one that matches the email. This is a change from Lion and all previous versions, where the From address was chosen based on the email headers, regardless of which inbox the email currently resided in.

For many (probably most) users, this change won't make any difference, because the inbox address would, in most cases, match the email's address. However, for users whose setups involve email aliases or email forwarders that gather messages into one box prior to being downloaded by Mail, this causes unexpected and undesirable behavior.

I am not sure I have the proper test vehicle. The alias addresses associated with my iCloud account are correctly being presented whether in the specific Inbox, or the blended Inbox.

Also, I had not, but now have, checked things in IMAP account folders. With my IMAP, private domain accounts, aliases that are collected and received in the true account have never been set up to be replied from. They are there to either ignore, or reply with the true address. So they do not work as a test vehicle.

Ernie

I had remapped the command-R key to my script in Spark, but I like your modifications better and plan to switch to them.

Thanks for your contribution to a workaround.

Do let me know if you ever figure out how to add the eye-candy when the "reply window" pops up, so that we get the animation like default, instead of the window just instantly being popped out 🙂

Just throwing my hat in this ring....

I think if they aren't going to "fix" what most of us see as a bug, and others see *us* being "annoyed", then what they should do is allow the reply from original to address IF you have a POP/SMTP account to go with that address - which I do have. I would be really happy to not have to stop and check the "from" address every friggin time I hit reply to an email.

FWIW - I don't have this problem on my iphone or ipad. It's only happening on ML mail.

What's even more frustrating than manually picking the account for me is the process of deleting and assinging the proper email signature. I've sent quite a few already from the wrong account or with the wrong signature.

I have two mail accounts set up (one xyz@me.com, which I'll call account 1, and a second that is a google apps account, I'll call that account 2).

Mail App-->Composing-->Send new messages from:

Account of Selected Mailbox

In this setting, if I unhide the Mailboxes pane at the left of the mail window in Mountain Lion and select the account 1 mailbox, then click the 'Compose New Message' icon, a message is created using the mailbox selected in the Mailboxes pane.

If I change the selection to account 2 in the Mailboxes pane, then click the 'Compose New Message' icon, a message is created using that account instead.

If I reply to any message the reply goes from whichever account the person sent the message to.

If I create a new message and no mailbox is selected, it appears as though the first account in the list of mailboxes is used.

Specifying an account in 'Send new messages from:'

If I specify either account 1 or 2 as the default for 'Send new messages from:' the a new message is sent from that account regardless of which mailbox I have selected. Likewise, if a create an email from outside the email app, the specified account is used.

This seems like correct behaviour to me; I'm quite happy with it anyway.

jmerichards wrote:

Mail App-->Composing-->Send new messages from:

[…]

Account of Selected Mailbox

If I reply to any message the reply goes from whichever account the person sent the message to.

[…]

This seems like correct behaviour to me; I'm quite happy with it anyway.

I think people shoud read the thread, instead of always repeating the same things.

This works for you because the e-mails in your mailboxes belong to those imboxes. I can assume that you didn't moved them to other folders and that you don't have rules that say like "if the mail is from xxx@pizza.com put that mail in the "PIZZA" folder" and "if the mail is from yyy@sushi.net put it in the SUSHI folder. And so on.

In this case, when you reply to an e-mail that has been moved to another folder (or another mailbox), you don't reply from the account that received that message, but from the first in your list of mailboxes.

To reply from the correct account you have to manually select it yourself.

Before Mountain Lion you didn't have to do this, because Mail looked at the address those mail was sent to, and replied accordingly.

I understand the problem people are describing. Whether or not it is a bug is open to conjecture; it may be an intended change (although doesn't seem like a good thing to change without documentation).

This article might be useful to some people.

http://tidbits.com/article/13189

I found a workable solution for me - I set up a rule to check the "to" address and if it is one of my fwd addresses I have it moved to that inbox. That solves the reply sender problem.

Keep in mind though, this only works because I have an smtp account set up to send from my domain. That requires I have the account set up in Mail to use it, and that setup generates an in box to move the incoming email to. Theoretically I would think you could set up an inbox for your fwd account using gmail as the Server info if you have gmail setup to "send mail as" the original acct.

Hope I haven't confused anybody! I'll be happy to clarify if you need me to.