In my last post from the Going Hybrid series (at least for April) I wanted to just comment on something I noticed in the Mail application that comes standard with Apple’s OSX application.

First things first: I liked the program for its simplicity. Even though it probably has 1/10th the features of Outlook, I didn’t feel like anything was missing. It was very easy to use and simple to configure. After using Outlook for years it is refreshing. Their is a new version of Mail coming out in just a few weeks and perhaps it will be even better.

Ok, so what was my problem with it? It can’t handle the concept of a default email account. When you create a new message it uses the last received message as the from address or whichever one you last clicked on. Anybody know how to fix this?

For example, if somebody emails my bob@bobsBBQ.com address and I received that message it would change my default sending address to the bobsBBQ address. But let’s just say I also run a vegetarian web site at the same time (it’s a long shot I know). If I clicked to create a new message to my vegetable loving friends the message by default would be coming from my bobsBBQ address. That’s insane! I shouldn’t have to change my email account every time I write a new message.

So I stopped using it and used Entourage which is very nice and has about half the features of the regular Outlook (and Entourage is much nicer I might add). So that’s the story, it’s not the end of the world but it was really surprising that default didn’t mean default.

Going even further, I’m going to guess that there is a plugin you can install that will solve this problem. I just did a search and found this page which shows me a bunch of plugins and scripts to do various things. Here’s an article with some interesting plugins as well.