Order of SMTP Servers

Apple Mail always chooses a server that doesn’t work for the mail address I have as From. I have to wait for it to time out, then choose the right one. I absolutely cannot find a way to reorder these SMTP servers or make it use the SMTP server listed in the account for that email. The preferred email is wunder@wunderwood.org, but it uses the GMail one every time.

I am so tired of waiting two minutes after sending each email. Plus, there is a race condition between successfully sending it and getting the “not sent” notification, so I send two copies half the time.

I’m actually fairly knowledgeable about mail protocols, I even configured Sendmail back in the day.

Here is the pop-up.

Does the email address have a separate “account” associated with it, or can you set it up that way? In the mail settings, on the “Accounts” tab, when I select an account on the left and look at the “Server Settings” panel on the right, I can set the specific SMTP server associated with that account.

Yes, these are all separate accounts. It is weird that when I send from wunderwood.org it tries to send it via GMail. That just seems broken. Send to the SMTP server associated with the account I’m using, right?

I’d even be OK with changing the order of the accounts.

When you choose “wunder@…” in the left-hand list and click “Server Settings” on the right side, what do you see?

All pretty standard. Account is enabled and online. Server settings were set up with a config from Fastmail (my mail provider).

Hmm, the gmail account doesn’t have server settings, it has a drop-down for “Outgoing mail account”.

The account that works isn’t even enabled.

Things are more complicated because I tried the Google group email account, then it wasn’t even good enough, so I moved everything to Fastmail. But there is no way to back convert the account to a normal Gmail account because Google doesn’t actually build products.

I have a similar issue but not quite the same. I don’t get a failed delivery message, it just sends from the wrong account.

I have three primary email accounts; iCloud, gmail and Exchange. When I reply to an email sent to my iCloud account, Mail ALWAYS chooses the gmail account to reply with. Annoyingly, this is a shared account I use with a friend so if I don’t catch it my personal emails end up entwined with my shared account.

I’m yet to find a way to resolve it but it’s incredibly frustrating. There’s probably a case where replying from a different account is desired but I’m yet to think of one.

Yes, we both have the same problem – intermittently.

In the past, I’ve been able to get the autofill on replies to reset in macOS Mail by deleting recipients in Mail > Window > Previous Recipients .

Autofill is different, though I have had to clean up previous recipients. I copied an email from a document and MS Word had “fixed” the dashes in the domain name to be Unicode hyphens. That was a mess.

Did you check under Mail Settings > Composing > Send new messages from:

You should be able to select a permanent outgoing SMTP server or pick the automatic setting, where Mail tries to remember which SMTP server you used before with this particular recipient.

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I’ll try that, but it lists addresses, not accounts. I had it set to “choose best”, which it clearly was not doing.

Yes, and it’s set correctly to my iCloud account.

It’s also slightly ambiguously labeled “Send NEW Messages” which suggests it may be ignored for replies. I have a vague recollection of a setting in the past for a Reply With address but it doesn’t seem to exist now.