The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

So you’ve changed ISPs, tested out multiple email hosting services, and have finally settled into a small series of email addresses that you are going to stick with for awhile. Apple’s Mail.app stores all the SMTP servers you’ve used in the past in your preference file and asks what server you want to use for sending email when the default server is unavailable. This is great except for one thing - you’ve got 10 old servers that are useless for sending email still stored in the memories of the software. You’ve long since deleted the old accounts and can’t find discover where these old servers are lurking around. Here are three solutions:

1. There is a script called Manage SMTP Servers.scpt which is stored in Macintosh HD/Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts/ Double clicking the script file will launch the Script Editor. Since we are only wanting to execute the script press Run. This will bring up a list of SMTP severs that are not associated with an account in Mail.app. Hilight the servers you no longer want (you can select multiple by using the command-click method) and press OK. All those old servers are now gone.

2. Under OSX.3 and OSX.4 the Mail.app software allows the user to edit the SMTP server list when configuring an account. Navigate to Mail.app >Preferences >Accounts >Select any listed account on the left >Click Outgoing Mail Server on the right >Scroll through the list to the bottom and choose Edit Server List >Hilight the server to be removed >Click Remove Server. You will want to remove any server not associated with an active account. If you happen to delete an active server you will need to edit that email account’s settings and add the appropriate SMTP information again before sending email with that account.

3. If you would rather start Mail.app with a fresh slate and get rid of all the references to old accounts, present accounts, and personal tweaks you should close Mail.app. You can then can drag the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist file to the desktop and restart the application. Mail.app will act as it did the first time it was started and will ask for account information. If you don’t like the results of this, close Mail and simply drag the file back to it’s previous location and restart.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Best Practices, How To, Mail, WGN Radio Show Notes, Zimbra. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.