How to Stop Replying to Yourself in Mail
For the last few months, I’ve become a regular user of the “reply all” button.1
My new habit unearthed an interesting problem with Exchange accounts in macOS Mail: every time I hit “reply all”, my own address was included in the CC field. Each reply I sent whooshed back to inbox a few seconds later. What a pain.
The Cause
Aliasing. You see, everyone in my institution technically gets two email addresses:
- An ugly address with their employee number ([email protected])
- A pretty alias address with their full name ([email protected])
When I added my work Exchange account to macOS Mail, its canonical address was the ugly one. In fact, Mail had no knowledge of the pretty alias address at all.
[email protected] ≠ [email protected]
As far as Mail was concerned, my pretty alias address (which is used by default when sending emails from Outlook) might as well have been someone else entirely. That’s why Mail didn’t recognise it as me, and that’s why it wasn’t auto-removed from the CC field.
The Solution
Thankfully, Mail lets you add arbitrary addresses to email accounts. Go to Settings > Accounts > Work (or whatever) > Email Addresses > Edit Email Addresses…
Just add your organisation’s “pretty” account to the list, et voilà! No more pesky self-addressed emails.2