how to reorder mail accounts?

This is very disapointing. I have just realised that all my outgoing mail from the past few months has been sent from the wrong address. I have four email accounts in mail and no matter which account I set the "From" tab to, all mail comes from the same account, the wrong one. My clients must think I'm an idiot. I have tried all the above suggestions and nothing works. Is anyone at Apple reading these posts????

Is anyone at Apple reading these posts????

No.

What you see happening occurs with replies to emails that have been moved out of the Inbox. It will grab the first account in the queue as the from account.

Either use Smart Mailboxes so as to not move the email out of the inbox, or pay attention when you reply until (if) they change the behavior.

Thanks Barney, but selecting the correct email from the inbox list was not my problem. I had been careful to select the account from my inbox list and select the correct account from the "From"drop down within the message.

So I called Apple support and they fixed the issue.

So if anyone is still having this problem, try this:

Click on "Mail" and open "Preferences"

Under the Accounts menu, select the first email account from the list in the column on the left.

Under the "Account Information" tab for that email account, click on the pull down menu for "Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP): and choose "edit SMTP server list...

Double click on the text under the "Description" column, and give each email account a unique name ie. work, personal etc. Click OK and save changes when prompted.

This fixed my problem.

If, like me, you want all your outgoing mail to come from the same address,

go to Mail > Prefs > Accounts

Select the account you want all mail to come from, (on the left)

Click on the pull down menu for "Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP):

Choose your preferred account

Then click the "Use only this server" check box.

Job done

Arrrrgh!!!!! With the recent OS X update to 10.8.3 I was hoping the problem would have been fixed. Sadly not. Still no response from Apple.

I submit this through the Mail Feedback almost DAILY! It does no good at all. Every time there is a software update, I hope and hope that it is finally fixed, but it seems nobody in Cupertino thinks this is a problem... since OF COURSE, your iCloud mail is the most important.

It is my LEAST important address. In fact, I only use it to communicate with Apple, and to sync my iStuff. My next two LEAST important addresses appear next, because they are IMAP. The POP addresses I've had to "describe" with numbers, in order to get them to keep my order.

While I recognize this is doing 80% of what I want, it actually drives me CRAZY that these accounts are numbered! WIth everything Apple is doing to REMOVE extraneous items from the UI, it just looks stupid to have "01. 02. 03..." in the front of all my accounts.

I simply don't get it. Why would they re-order something I've already changed. This is like having a system preference that goes back to factory setting every time you open System Preferences. If you set scroll bars to be ON... imagine if ANY time you went into ANY system pref, the scroll bars turned OFF... or "secondary click" turned off for the mouse... it's just INSANE that they force the reordering of accounts like this.

I may not be understanding this but I just reordered my mail boxes (in the lefthand pane, not in in Preferences which would make more sense). And I found that the Preferences->Composing pane has the option "Send new messages from…" with the drop down menu. I chose (or defaulted to) "Account of selected mailbox" which does what I expect. And it looks like if no individual account is selected, just the combined Inbox, the topmost account is used.

I agree this could be clearer. The key seems to be to simply select the mailbox and then open a new composition window, and all should work as expected. Or have the most-used one be at the top if you don't have one selected in the Preferences->Composing pane. If you have 25 accounts to work with, I think that might be straining Mail's abilities.

It does seem like Mail.app is due for some rewriting/refactoring but iTunes has been long overdue for that as well.

I am having this problem as well. It has actually caused problems in my business by accidentally sending from the wrong email. Very frustrating and confusing for business clients. Now that I at least understand when it is happening, ie updating an emai account info, I can at last handle it. But APPLE, please fix this. This does seem new since Mountain Lion.

No.. you're not on the same issue. The problem is not about setting the "default" sending account... nor is is about the ability to reorder the accounts... I also reordered them in the left hand pane.

The issue is that AFTER you've put the accounts in the order you choose... if you make ANY change to ANY account settings, or add another account, MAIL will FORCE you into the order IT wants the accounts in.

That order ALWAYS has .me/.mac/.icloud mail in the FIRST position... any other IMAP accounts are then alphabetically in the next positions... then POP accounts are alphabetized as well.

Since my .me account is one I use only for communicating with Apple... that's really NOT what I want listed first. Also, I maintain an email address from each of my clients' domains. Some are IMAP, some are POP. I have them very carefully ordered, and WHAM! Mail decides differently!

It's just bad programming. There is NO REASON to change my preferred order!

Apple Mail Version 7.0 (1822). Maverics, 10.9.

The ability to rearrange email accounts is now provided in the left column of the main Mail window. Just expand the list of inboxes to show all accounts and drag them to whatever order you want. When you create a new email the drop down selection of email accounts order will reflect the order in the left column of the main window.

If I remember correctly, this is the way the order arrangement used to work in previous versions of mail. The function had dissappeared for some time and is now back.

Also, in the Mail preferences pane under the Composing tab and under the Addressing function you can set the default email address to use when composing mail. Screenshot attached.

Apple could do a much better job letting us know about it since that's a critical function for some of us.

Message was edited by: BravoMike09

Message was edited by: BravoMike09

BravoMike -

Thanks for your post, and I wish Mail made those reordered addresses stay. However, the first time I change the incoming mail server address, the order reverts to that chosen by Apple, with the iCloud address first.

Apple, are you there??? Nice to have a new version of Mail, but we still have a most annoying problem.

Oy, what a pain. Thanks for the update David. Wake up Apple!

I found this answer on MacFixit for Mavericks (late to this conversation)

Fortunately, there is an easy procedure to rearrange them:

1. Open up the "Internet Accounts" system preference pane
2. For each email account, in the order you want them to appear, uncheck and then re-check "Mail"

In this way, the accounts will be removed and readded to Mail in the order that you want them to appear.

Thanks Rick. That may work on iCloud and AOL IMAP accounts, but doesn't apply to POP accounts. I have a mixture of both so the "Mail" box on the POP accounts doesn't appear.

...so, we keep waiting for Apple to FIX this problem!!!

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.

Mail/Provide Mail Feedback

It seems like everytime Apple "improves" something these days, they break it. Reminds me of Microsoft in the VISTA days.