Easy way to change server settings when switching between home&office

Question

I have the following problem:
When I'm at home my email server (imap/smtp) is mail.mani.pt,
when I'm at the office I address it as 192.16.1.2
Each time I switch locations I have to modify all the account settings in mail. This is a pain.
Is there a easy way of doing this??
In Windows I use an app called PortTunnel where I can redefine certain ports, i.e. localhost:25->192.168.1.2:25 etc
So I only have to activate the different locations here (easy) and in the mail app the server is ALWAYS localhost.
Is there a way to do this under Mac?

Answer 1

If changing the incoming mail server on the fly is problematic, it should make no difference if a script or the user does it manually in the account preference. Since this is something that users may have to do for various reasons (travel, ISP changes, whatever), it would be very lame if Mail could not handle this gracefully.
From what I can tell, Mail 2.x uses the initial mail server name in creating the account's folder but thereafter uses UID's & path names stored in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist to reference its contents. (For those interested, the property is MailAccounts array.) As long as these don't change, there should be no problems.
However, this suggests that .plist corruption or removing the .plist for troubleshooting could contribute to this kind of problem, so one should be very careful to use the initial mail server name if it becomes necessary to reconstruct the account.