One .Mac Account to Rule Them All

For most of us, we have and use different identities. Some of us may have one identity for friends and family and another identity for freelancing and so on. With all these identities, we need a way to bring them all together into one.

I have four email accounts that I use the most, which means I have four different mailboxes that I check often. When using mail.app, the left sidebar of your mail.app application can become a mess with all of its folders. I decided to figure out a way to make my four mailboxes, one.

As some of you may already know, you can create one account in mail.app and in the email address field on the “Account Information” tab, you can enter a comma delimited list of all your email addresses. However, you may not know that if your .mac account is the primary account you use, the comma delimited option will not work.

But there is a solution that you can use with your .mac email account in mail.app:

First, you will need to forward your email accounts to your .mac email address. Now, if you use Google Apps or Gmail, under the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab, you can put in your .mac email address and then you should choose to archive your account’s copy of the message. You will want to do this in case you need to search for an old message that is no longer available in your mail client.

Second, create your .mac email account in mail.app. You will then want to create different signatures for your different identities. Now in order to create different identities, you will need to add your outgoing servers for each email account. Make sure to give a description of each account, and I will explain why a little later. Please take note that the different outgoing servers serve as your different identities.

Third, on the “Account Information” tab for your .mac email account, you will need to choose your .mac outgoing server. Unless your do so, your signatures will not be saved to the .mac account you created. When composing or replying to a message, a list of available outgoing servers (identities) will populate on the left just below the subject field. This is why you need to give a description for each of your outgoing servers (i.e. Personal, Work).

If not, it will give you a list like smtp.googlemail.com. That might work if you only have one, but if you are like me and have three (Google App and/or Gmail accounts), you will need to give them a description in order to know from what email address your message will be sent.

By using this method (or the other method if .mac is not your primary account), mail.app will be much cleaner and uncluttered. Also, it will help with your work flow. Lastly, you should create two folders: a hold folder and an action folder. Your hold folder should contain the messages you need to reference to at a later date. The action folder should contain the messages that need immediate attention. You can create an archive folder to archive your old messages, but this is not needed if you use Google Apps or Gmail.

The only painstaking task is that when you are composing a new email message or replying to an email message, you will need to choose the identity from the drop down list as well as the signature from the drop down list. Perhaps there is an applescript or rule that can be written to make this automated for you? If I come up with something, I will definitely make it known. Now, go and have fun with mail.app.