eMail address 'From' list in new messages

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Level 2

306 points

eMail address 'From' list in new messages

This is normally created from the addresses you have entered in the Email address field of all the accounts. I do NOT send messages 'From' any of my iCloud accounts and so I've not entered them in the accounts and hence they did not appear in the pop up list on new email messages - until now.

Since an update (recently, but no idea exactly what, probably 10.8.2) I now have the @me.com and @icloud.com for each account added into the pop up list. SInce I never use these, I never want to see them and more importantly I do NOT want them clogging up this list. I had thought the update had simply entered them into the account Preferences, but I now find that is not the case, so there's some other jiggery pokery that is adding these UNWANTED addresses. This is not a catastrophe, but it is bloody irritating.

Has anyone got any idea how these are now being included and hence how they might be eliminated again? Is there some plist somewhere that stores this list? Or some other way to GET RID OF THEM?

Posted on Oct 5, 2012 9:37 AM

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Answer 1

UKenGB Author

Level 2

306 points

Oct 5, 2012 11:31 AM in response to UKenGB

In fact, these additional addresses are stored in ~/Libary/Mail/V2/MailData/Accounts.plist as email aliases. But all is not as rosy as it may first appear.

I quit Mail and edited the plist to eliminate those aliases. Started Mail again, started a new message and the pop up list of From addresses was briefly devoid of those aliases I had deleted from the plist, but almost immediately, the list was redrawn and they were added back in. So obviously, when it first runs, Mail checks back to iCloud and recreates any aliases it considers missing:-(

When I look at the iCloud accounts in Preferences, these unwanted aliases are listed as addresses and cannot be edited.

So I'm still no wiser as to how I can prevent them from being listed in Mail on the Mac.

What is particularly annoying is that my iCloud accounts are set to NOT handle email. Everything else, but NOT email. I have plain IMAP accounts to do that and only these are shown in Mail. The iCLoud accounts do not appear, but I still get these aliases being listed, yet the information is being harvested from NON email accounts. Apart from the belief that Apple shouldn't be foisting this sort of crap on their users, it's not even been correctly implemented.

So still hopeful someone has discovered a way to prevent this.

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