Don't CC Yourself in Mac Mail With Alias Addresses

Citation: Mark A. McBride (markmcb), Don't CC Yourself in Mac Mail With Alias Addresses, OmniNerd.com, 16 December 2008, accessed on 21 May 2013 from http://www.omninerd.com/articles/Don_t_CC_Yourself_in_Mac_Mail_With_Alias_Addresses
Tags: mac, mail, cc, plist, and osx

Mac Mail is great, but as with all things Mac, the simple user interface can sometimes feel a little prohibitive. I recently got stumped with an issue that was driving me crazy. Every time I hit “reply all” to a message, my name was ending up in the Cc: line despite my preferences explicitly telling Mail not to do that.

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Clearly I was not asking to Cc myself. The answer, I would find, was elsewhere.

After thinking for a moment, it hit me. My account responds to two email addresses, i.e., “markmcb” was the alias for the actual account “mark”. Realizing that this wasn’t a normal situation, it made sense that it wouldn’t be a normal option. So I went to the plist editor for help.

I opened ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist and found the below entry. Note that only one address is listed.

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com.apple.mail.plist opened in the property list editor.

All I had to do to make Mail function as I wanted it to was to add another sibling entry to the existing address listing, thus including the alias account. I hit save, restarted Mail, and bingo, no more Cc’ing myself. Simple, but not necessarily obvious. I hope that helps someone out there scouring the net in frustration as I was.