Changing smtp settings and account selection in Mail

Question

I've just begun tinkering with Applescript... but not for fun! I'm not a programmer but I understand some VERY basic things about scripting.
I need a way to set the smtp USER NAME for a specific account in Mail to a different user name. (I would select the user name from a dialog and I figured out that part.) None of the other settings will change. Is there a way to do this? Of course there must be -- I was able to set the user name for the incoming mail server but I can't for the life of me figure out how to do this for the outgoing!
Also, I would like Applescript to change the account that the frontmost message will be sent from. I don't want it to be the default account in this instance. Is that possible? I haven't been able to even come close to figuring that out.
One last thing: How do you concatenate a string in AppleScript? For example (where aVariable = "01"):
"johnsmith_" & aVariable & "@mydomain.com"
result I want: "[email protected]"
I was able to figure out how to assign a value to "aVariable" but I couldn't tell if I was using the correct method for stringing everything together. The line generated an error but I couldn't tell where I messed up.
It's been interesting and promising but also very frustrating so any help would be appreciated.
Vera
G5 Dual 2.5 (1.5GB ram); G4 Dual 450 (704MB ram)   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

Answer 1

> Outgoing servers are different - despite the smtp server appearing to be part of the 'Account' settings, they're not. There's a separate class for smtp server'.
In this case, to set the username used to authenticate against your SMTP server you'd do soemthing like:
set user name of smtp server "my.company.net" to "johndoe"
If I have multiple email accounts all accessing the same smtp server but with different user names, how does it know which one to change? I tried something like this...
<pre class=command>set user name of smtp server "my.company.net" of account "Account #3" to "[email protected]"</pre>
(BTW: My smtp server uses complete email addresses in the username field so I changed it just to make it clearer for myself)
But I get this error:
<pre>Mail got an error: NSReceiverEvaluationScriptError: 4</pre>
> > Also, I would like Applescript to change the account that the frontmost message will be sent from
Hmm, I can't see this off-hand, either. I'll keep digging.
It would be nice if there was something. Optionally, I might be able to work changing the DEFAULT account to another account into my "workflow" instead. Is that any easier to find?
> You have it right. The & is used to concatenate strings. ... I'm not sure why it would generate a message, unless 'aVariable' wasn't what you thought. What did the error message say?
Unfortunately I don't remember anymore -- I was getting so many errors, it's all a blur now... and I already deleted the code. There was probably something else wrong in the line. I've tried concatenating elsewhere since then and it worked fine but I didn't think to try that before asking.
Thanks for the help!
Vera
G5 Dual 2.5 (1.5GB ram); G4 Dual 450 (704MB ram)   Mac OS X (10.4.9)