How can I change order of email accounts in Mail on Mountain Lion?

In Mail on Mountain Lion I have only two email accounts, but the wrong one has been set as default (because it was an account I had overlooked and added later). I cannot find how to change the order of the email accounts. One possibility is to delete the non-default account and re-add it, so that it becomes the most recent and thus (presumably) the default, but this would delete all the email messages in that account, which I cannot afford.
It's a great flaming pain to try to remember each email I write to select the second account option, and yet I can find no way to change email account order---not in Mail and not in System Preferences. Dragging them certainly does not work.
Can Apple have really missed this? Is there any solution?

Comfortable with terminal...know how to edit using TextEdit:
Open up a Terminal and use the following commands to change your Mail.app preferences file to an XML format – the default format is binary, and you can't edit this.
cd ~/Library/Preferences
plutil -convert xml1 com.apple.mail.plist
Then, open this file com.apple.mail.plist with a text editor of your choice, preferably one that highlights XML syntax, but you can also use TextEdit:
open -a "TextEdit" com.apple.mail.plist
Now, look for the key called MailAccounts. It's value is an array, with dict children. Here, you'll find all your mail accounts in the order they were created in.
You can now manually move these dict children around. Save the XML file and reopen Mail. Now, your Mail account order will be changed.

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