Open Radar

 
Summary:

In Mail 6.1 and before, replying to an email automatically changed the "From" account to the one the original email was sent to (assuming an account for this email existed).

In Mail 6.2, a setting in "Preferences->Composing" only allows you to select either a specific default account for the "From" field, or to use the "Account of selected mailbox".

This very much break any normal expectations and workflow for people that have forwarded email accounts.

With previous version of Mail, if an email was sent to "support@mydomain.tld" which was an alias (forward) to "someone@mydomain.tld", we could ensure Mail replied using the "support@mydomain.tld" simply by creating a "support@mydomain.tld" Mail account with a proper outgoing (SMTP) server. The same worked for different domains too, for example, if "someone@myotherdomain.tld" was forwarded to "someone@mydomain.tld" and a Mail account existed for "someone@myotherdomain.tld", replying to such an email would set the "From" field correctly to "someone@myotherdomain.tld".

With Mail 6.2, the "From" field for both these examples is set to "someone@mydomain.tld" as the received email "resides" in the inbox of said account.

Steps to Reproduce:

Setup an email account for "yourname@yourdomain.tld" that is an IMAP/Exchange account. Configure your email server to forward mail received for "anothername@yourdomain.tld" to "yourname@yourdomain.tld". Setup a Mail account with a valid outgoing (SMTP) server for "anothername@yourdomain.tld" (so you can successfully send emails from this account), incoming email should be set to "invalid" as it will not be be used (You may also want to uncheck "Include when automatically checking for new messages" in "Advanced" tab).

Send an email to "anothername@yourdomain.tld". Check for new mail. The email will be received in the unified Inbox. Select the mail a "Reply" to it.

Expected Results:

The "From" account should be set to "anothername@yourdomain.tld".

Actual Results:

The "From" account is set to "yourname@yourdomain.tld", not "anothername@yourdomain.tld".

Regression:

Works as expected in Mail 6.1.

Notes:

I certainly know that the "From" account can be changed using the drop down when replying, however, forcing users to do so is error prone and inefficient for the same reason Apple introduced per-account email signatures. When replying to an email sent to an existing account in Mail, Mail should always default to this account when replying. I would go as far as to say that replying is different than composing a new message, thus, if you want to make this a setting, the setting should be located under the "Responding" section of the "Composing" preferences. A user could certainly want to always use a specific default "From" address when composing new messages but still want to reply using the address an email was sent to.

29-Oct-2012 10:47 PM Marco Ponton:
Please replace any reference to Mail 6.1 with Mail 5.x. I did not test with Mail 6.0 or 6.1. I assume this new behavior was introduced in 6.0 but cannot confirm for sure. My apologies for the error/typo.

06-Nov-2012 07:29 PM Apple Developer Bug Reporting Team :
This bug has been closed as Duplicate. The issue is being tracked under the Bug ID listed below in the Related Problem section of your bug report. To check the status of the original bug report, please visit the Related Problem section of the Problem Detail view of your closed duplicate bug.