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.
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.
Thank you. Is that the list that I access from Mail using Window > Previous Recipients? If so, I believe that also includes senders (because there were some “no-reply” addresses in there, and I doubt that I would have tried to send email to such an address).
I had high hopes for this being the explanation. I’m familiar enough with that list that I thought of it immediately when I read your post, and I’m sure I have sent or received email from Jane Doe. However, on the infrequent occasions when I look at that list, I usually prune addresses that I expect not to use or see–and apparently I had pruned Jane Doe’s email because a search for Doe turned up nothing.
If that was the list you meant, then it was a great idea but apparently not the explanation. (Off-topic for this thread, but what is that list good for? What problem might it cause if I deleted every entry in it?) If that wasn’t the list you meant, please give me a hint on how to access the one you meant.
Yes, that is the list and Halfsmoke has shared what happens if you delete the items. I am sorry that Jane Doe was not on the list as that would have been an easy answer.
For now, I think I’ll assume Apple keeps a “double-secret” (TOTH to the movie Animal House) copy of the list that has some entries that I’ve removed from the visible list.
I wonder if Mail.app scans the Sent Mail folder looking for matches in an attempt to be helpful in resolving email addresses to human recognizable names. I don’t know if it does but it would be something as a product manager I would dream up.
Is Jane in your Contacts, under either name?
What does the From: line say?
For example, maybe Contacts says “Jane White” and the From: says “From: Jane Black <jblack@herisp.com>”?
You can see From: in View > Message > Raw Source, although you might have to search for it.
I don’t know which name would show up before opening the message.
Not the Sent folder, but another folder elsewhere in the hierarchy did contain an old message “From: Jane Doe”. (I only see “From: Jane Doe” when I view Raw Source; the display in the message window and the mailbox window says Jane Smith. And, surprising to me, the From line is not listed when I View > Message > All Headers.)
Thank you for that. I had assumed that I would see the From line in All Headers, and I only looked at Raw Source to prove my assumption correct. (Boy, was I wrong.) Once I found that my assumption was wrong, I looked at the most recent message from Jane. It also has “From: Jane Doe”, so I assume Jane has not updated her mail settings.
Based on all this, I now believe that Mail was displaying the information in the From line of the message until I made the inbox the focus of Mail, then Mail matched the actual email address to an entry in my Contacts and displayed the name from my Contacts.
Most of my clients were surprised when I showed them the Previous Recipients window in Mail (accessed via the Window menu). It’s a handy thing to know about when you get unexpected names and addresses.
The Previous Recipients list remembers everybody you’ve corresponded with. If a friend of yours changes their email address but every time you start typing their name, Mail pre-fills their discontinued email address, that’s the place to go delete it.
I assume you mean everyone I’ve corresponded with (or has sent me email, even if I haven’t replied) until I delete their entry in Previous Recipients?
It seems like I once deleted an entry from Previous Recipients and Mail behaved as if the entry still existed, but that was long ago and I don’t remember details. Perhaps there is a cached version that is not updated promptly.
If Mail is pre-filling an address that doesn’t exist anymore because your friend changed their email address, deleting it from Previous Recipients is the way we always fixed that. It might require a restart of Mail to refresh the cache or something, I guess.
Because that’s the only reason I ever used that list, I really don’t know if you had to have had a two-way correspondence in order for the address to get on the list. Maybe so, because otherwise all the spammers would be in there too ;)