No way to specify sending server

I think that an automated process of sending mail by whatever outbound path is available would be an exceedingly ill-conceived misfeature.

In my own case: the policies and practices of the various mail servers by which I submit different classes of email are diverse, not entirely rational, not entirely self-consistent on a per-server or per-identity basis, and not readily expressed in compact discrete terms. In some cases it would be technically easy to violate policies which are not enforced by software but are policed ex post facto by people who are rewarded for humorless rigidity in their enforcement. In other cases a poor match of sending identity to submission server could create a significant chance of programmatic silent discarding of mail. I have 8 accounts currently configured in MailMate using 7 unique outbound mail servers, and no 2 identities or servers merit identical handling. If I were to detail all of the "rules" I follow, words and phrases like "usually" and "maybe" and "in special circumstances" would be needed. I don't expect a MUA to do any better than have a default path for an identity and allow me to override that association as needed.

That is why I think that MUA selection of an outbound mail server must have an explicit UI and should not attempt to work in magical (i.e. uncontrollable and undocumented) ways. Having a menu to select the outbound server available in the message compose window that defaults to the server of the sending identity (as with Mail.app or TBird's "Virtual Identity" add-on) is adequate and simple. Assuming simplicity in how people might want or need to route mail won't work well and trying to map all of the real-world complexities into a subtle and complete configuration model is probably a hopeless task.

I agree with Bill here. I find the strategy employed by Apple's Mail.app quite sensible: try the default server for the account. If it fails, ask the user if she wants to try again, try with another server or postpone sending.

This could be the strategy even if there were a server popup in the composer.

For reference, here is how Apple Mail lets the user select any configured SMTP server, no matter which address is used as "from:" (see attached screenshot). Basically the choice of from address and smtp server are totally disconnected and orthogonal choices.

I think resolving this ticket would also cover the use case described in ticket #209.

The ability to select an alternative SMTP server would also be useful for scenarios in which users forward several e-mail addresses to single IMAP account and need to reply with the correct identity, which may require a different SMTP server than that associated with the receiving IMAP account.

It would be helpful if MailMate allowed the creation of send-only (SMTP) accounts and provided a means to associate these with an address, or at least permit the selection of an alternative SMTP server (as suggested above) if the message cannot be sent via the primary SMTP server.

Also, some forwarded addresses may be POP-only, which means that creating an extra IMAP account just to define a new SMTP server wouldn't work.

When we have this feature? I just configure my new business account to forward to GMAIL and in Gmail Interface I already setup a new SMTP and Alias for my Business account so when I send I can choose which one I will use my real account or my Alias Business account with Different SMTP, I don't want come back to Apple Mail really.. :)

Thanks!

@infotexture: Thanks for yet another aspect of SMTP settings I should keep in mind when I have time to improve this.

@Ricardson: Gmail allows you setup additional addresses for an account, but you must verify that you “own” them. I think this is where it is described: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22370

I've have MailMate 3905 on an OS X 10.8 machine (it claims to be the latest version) and set up imap/smtp access for both gmail and my corporate account. When I attempt to send email out using my corporate address, it tries to use the SMTP connection to gmail.com. This obviously doesn't work since gmail doesn't allow relaying.

This ticket seems to indicate that particular bug was fixed some time ago, but I'm still running into it now. How can I force the SMTP server to the correct host, since it's not picking that up from the selected "From" address?

@Amy: You should check that you have the correct SMTP settings for each of the IMAP accounts. Go to “File ▸ Edit IMAP Account ▸ ...” to do this.

Unrelated to this problem, r3905 is the latest public release, but there is also a beta available on the homepage.

Let me know if you still cannot make it work.

Augh, my apologies, apparently we changed our mail config to use 465. Setting the port number fixed the problem.

Any news on this?
That's the only thing that stops me from making Mailmate my primary email client.

@Dmitry: Sorry, no news yet and it's still not near the top of my list. It's not requested very often, but it's one of those features that should be provided by a power user email client. I think it's actually possible to implicitly force MailMate to use a different SMTP server. This can be done by moving a draft to the Draft mailbox of the corresponding IMAP account before sending (I haven't verified this).

I'd like to add my support for this feature, although my requirement is slightly different. I have one IMAP account configured in MailMate, but when replying from one of my identities I'd like it to use an alternative SMTP server. I can't see any way to do this at present.

The reason I want this is because I use getmail to retrieve messages from some external accounts and pull them into my maildir, and if I send replies through my own SMTP server then the third party system doesn't have a copy in its "Sent" folder. It would be really cool if someday we could have custom rules that determine which outbound SMTP server to use.

Shame MailMate isn't open source or I'd have a go at implementing it myself :)

Hi, I just wanted to add my vote for multiple SMTP servers per account. Here are my use-cases:

• I need to switch SMTP-servers to be able to redirect email (send as another user)
• I need to switch SMTP-servers when replying as another identity (multiple email addresses are forwarded to a single email address for reading)

See this this mailing list post for a solution to some of these problems.