Joe Lennon

I personally don’t like using automatic setup wizards when creating email accounts in my mail client, and in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple have decided to remove the checkbox from Apple Mail that allows you to bypass the automated setup of accounts. In the case of my work Exchange mail account, this actually prevented me from setting up my mail account, as it was detecting the incorrect mail server address and failing each time. You’d think that at least if the auto-setup fails it would give you a manual failsafe, but alas, no.

After some rooting around the Web, I discovered that if you hold down the “Option” (alt) key when pressing the “Continue” button on the first page of the Account Setup wizard, it will bypass the auto-discovery step and ask you for the server details to be input manually.