Change the sorting of “From:” mail accounts in Apple Mail

Question

I have 11 email accounts (work etc). When I'm creating a new message, the "from:" field is a dropdown list of my email accounts I wish to send the email from.

They are in the order of how I setup my accounts initially, frustrating in hindsight, having not known how I create my accounts (what order) would be a convenience issue down the road.

So, does anyone know how to modify the sort order of mail accounts?

Answer 1

First of all, quit Mail.app if it's still running.

Open up a Terminal and use the following commands to change your Mail.app preferences file to an XML format – the default format is binary, and you can't edit this.

cd ~/Library/Preferences
plutil -convert xml1 com.apple.mail.plist

Then, open this file com.apple.mail.plist with a text editor of your choice, preferably one that highlights XML syntax, but you can also use TextEdit:

open -a "TextEdit" com.apple.mail.plist

Now, look for the key called MailAccounts. It's value is an array, with dict children. Here, you'll find all your mail accounts in the order they were created in.

You can now manually move these dict children around. Save the XML file and reopen Mail. Now, your Mail account order will be changed.

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To prove that this works, here's a screenshot before:

And this is after editing the file:

Answer 2

The method @slhck provided works, and you can also do this through the Mail Preferences as well.

Open Mail.app, click Mail -> Preferences.

Click on Accounts and you will see your account list. Reorder them as you wish by dragging an account over or below and reorder them as you wish.

Close the Preferences pane and quit Mail.app and then open it again. It will be ordered in the way you placed them in.

Here is a screenshot of the "From:" field before:

Then after: