Set a preferred e-mail address?

This is only required when using a Group mailing list when contacts included in the Group have multiple email addresses.

I assume you are using the autofill feature when addressing a message and if so, when entering a contact's name for the To: field for example, if you pause the Mail.app will bring up all available email addresses for the contact to choose from.

This is only required when using a Group mailing list
when contacts included in the Group have multiple
email addresses.

I don't understand what you mean by this. I have a number of friends & associates with several email addresses in Address Book. I too would like some way to set a default email address that "stuck" as a default, but the behavior seems as the OP described: whatever the last address used in Mail is what it suggests, with or without autofill, as the first choice in subsequent emails.

This has nothing to do with Groups, only with multiple email addresses for individuals in Address Book.

I too would like some way to set a default email address that "stuck"
as a default

There isn't one but the autofill feature works as I described.

What you consider a problem, I don't which is why there is Baskin-Robbins ice cream - 31 flavors.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/

This has nothing to do with Groups

Sure it has. In Address Book, open Address Book Help from the Help menu, and read an article titled Selecting which addresses to use for members of a group. Whether this is what the OP was looking for or not I don't know.

What I meant was it doesn't have anything to do with what I want regarding default vs. temporary email addresses. 😉

Also, I'm not too keen on the auto-complete feature: I don't have any useful LDAP server access, so I pretty much have to remember the beginning of the email address of a recipient I want to use or the "hits" I get generally aren't relevant.

[Example (hypothetical): Al Jones has email addresses of "ajones@whatever.edu," "alj@whatever.net," "thealster@whatever.com," etc. in my address book. Obviously, by the second letter or so, auto-complete starts suggesting all manner of e-mail addresses that have nothing to do with the desired recipient, so it is more of a distraction than an aid.]

So, I just end up turning off the feature & relying on the address panel to find the desired address, which is where this default vs. temporary issue arises: whatever I last used as the address is the highlighted one. And, since that is a floating panel instead of a regular window, it is a slow & clumsy way to get to the address I need.

I don't want to have to wait and
click on the pop-up

Apple appear to me to have gone for the best way of doing this, and it rarely takes more than one second for the list of optional addresses to appear. Is life so short?
Where you have two email addresses for an individual, you could change the address book entry on one of them significantly (reverse first and last name, for example) so that the autofill will always find the correct one. However, I think a bit of patience is the real solution!

My problem is that I could wait forever for the right address to pop up -- without an LDAP server, auto-complete looks only at email address matches, not actual names of people, & unless the person I'm trying contact begins every one of his or her email addresses with the same letters, the list won't include them.

I don't see any way to access addresses by a person's name besides through the Address Panel, in which case the multi-entry name swap thing is no better (or worse) than it is now. I still have to select the appropriate email address, & still want a default that doesn't change to the last-used entry.

What am I missing?

Are you saying that if you type in the name
of a person you have stored in Address Book.app, Mail
won't find their e-mail address?

No, I'm saying that if I compose a message in Mail, it won't find & auto-complete an email address by entering a person's name unless there is an LDAP server involved. (LDAP = Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, available at organizations like colleges & large businesses, using a server to cross-reference its members' names & email addresses.) As I understand it, without an LDAP server, auto-complete will only work with email addresses & Address Book group names, not with people's names.

This is what I'm wondering if I have wrong.

Are you storing your
addresses in Address Book, or just relying on Mail's
internal address table?

There is no internal address table in Mail. It gets this functionality from Address Book, which is why the floating Address Panel you can call up in Mail without launching Address Book itself looks like a mini version of Address Book.

Greg,

Thanks very much for the tip! I didn't actually have to try another Mac or account, but it got me thinking along the right lines. I realized that Mail had been left open & frequently just hidden in my normal account for some time, & that my Mac had been acting a little cranky for the past few days.

When I checked Mail's prefs, I discovered they were somewhat scrambled: CC myself was checked (which I never want or would set on purpose), use auto-complete was not checked, & several other settings were different from what I prefer. Resetting everything to my norms did not to restore the expected operation, but quitting & restarting the app did.

I then ran a consistency check on user prefs with Terminal (sudo plutil -s ~/Library/preferences/*.plist) & it turned up nothing, so while Mail is happy again, I probably should do some maintenance to see why this happened in the first place.

Anyway, Mail now works as you describe so thanks again for the help.