Apple Mail, sender's display name

TidBITS Talk
1

Upon startup, Apple Mail showed a sender’s name as Jane Doe. The focus (is that the correct term?) of Mail was the Sidebar. I clicked in the Inbox pane and the sender’s name changed to Jane Smith. (Maybe I needed to click on the message in the Inbox; when I just repeated the process, the name didn’t change until I clicked on the message, but I do not believe I did that the first time I saw this peculiarity. Obviously, this was repeatable, at least three times.) Jane is in my Contacts as Jane Smith.

Why did Jane’s name initially show as Jane Doe? (Each name was correct at some time, but there was a name change.) When I chose View > Message > All Headers and had Mail search, it reported no instance of Doe in the message.

This was on a Mac running macOS Sequoia 15.7.8 in case it matters.

2

Not sure if this helps but best as I can tell, there are two lists that translates email addresses to names. One is the Contacts list you mentioned. The second is a previous sent-to list mail maintains of people you have emailed to before. Perhaps you sent an email to Jane Doe in the past and the past sent-to list went first and switched to contacts you went to look more closely at it.