Just discovered another annoying "feature"of the Mail app

[Furby2005]

The "feature" I'm referring to is far from new, having been introduced with Sierra I believe, but has only recently started to become an annoyance to me. I'm referring to the default option to "Automatically select best account" when sending mail. I've always assumed, wrongly it seems, that an email would always be sent from the currently selected account (which was default behaviour prior to Sierra). Recently, however, I started noticing that people were replying to me on "wrong" email addresses and tried to discover the reason. I use my iCloud account most of the time so, with that selected, I started composing a few test emails and noticed that sometimes, quite randomly, the "from" address would be a different account. Even more weirdly, I noticed that adding certain "to" email addresses would actually change the "from" address from the one previously selected (i.e. if the recipient had a gmail address, the "from" would change to my gmail address) without any notification! This is when I discovered the "automatically select..." feature. This seems an absolutely bizarre and absurd option. Even worse to make it the default and remove the "currently selected" option altogether. How can Apple be so arrogant as to assume that their Mail app knows better than I do what email address I want to send from? (Spoiler alert: it doesn't!) What I also don't understand is why this suddenly seems to have become such a problem for me after all this time. There were a lot of complaints on various forums shortly after the "feature" was introduced but nothing much lately and I can't work out what has changed to make the app's behaviour suddenly become so erratic. Fortunately this has just been an annoyance for me with no serious repercussions but for someone juggling personal and business addresses I can imagine the consequences of an error could be embarrassing or worse. Time to start looking at alternative mail apps I think...

 

[Thor774]

I have only had the system choose the wrong email account when clicking on a mail address on a web page to send a new email. When this is done I have noticed that Apple Mail prefers to send the email from my iCloud account which I rarely use and I have to manually check the From field to be sure that my main email account is selected there.

When I create a new mail from within Apple Mail, it uses the current mailbox I had selected when I clicked on the New Mail icon.

This is taken from the help text about the Automatically select best account setting:

If you use several email accounts, you can have Mail automatically select the best address, based on the email address of the first recipient in your message, as well as the currently selected Mailbox and message.