Shawn, a co-worker in one of our Boston offices, was bitten today not by a bug but rather a new feature in Entourage 2008 SP1 (12.1.0). Every message he was receiving showed his correct E-mail address but the wrong display name. They looked something like this:
instead of this:
At first we thought possibly his Exchange account was incorrectly configured. A quick check of Active Directory showed everything was just fine.
Maybe, someone had Shawn's correct E-mail address but had mistakenly put his company name in the wrong field in a contact record? Nope. This was happening with every message he received and from multiple senders.
Where was his name entered incorrectly?
Fortunately, I recognized the problem from an earlier private discussion among MVPs although I'd never seen it before.
Beginning with Entourage 2008 SP1 (12.1.0), the display name for a person (the name that appears next to the E-mail address) will be pulled from contact records in either the local Address Book or the Exchange Contacts list depending on the default account. If the default account is a POP or IMAP account then Entourage will match names from the local Address Book and if the default account is an Exchange account then Entourage will match names from the Exchange Contacts list. If the sender is not in your own contacts then Entourage will display the name as it was received from the sender.
What Shawn and I discovered is that this will also apply to the "Me" contact record, which is the record for the Entourage user himself and is always in the local Address Book.
That means since Entourage didn't find a matching E-mail address in his Exchange Contacts it then looked in his local Address Book where it found the default "Me" contact record created when he set up Entourage 2008 for the first time. Instead of installing Office 2008 under his own name, he had entered our company name.
The fix for this is simple. If you find your display name appears as something other than what you expect, locate the contact record and correct the name. Remember, it won't be listed under your name but under the wrong display name.
And keep in mind that this new SP1 feature applies to all E-mail addresses in your Address Book or Contacts list. Therefore, if your friend "Robert Smith" sends you a message and you have a contact record for him under "Bubba Smith" then "Bubba Smith" will be the name you see displayed in all his messages.
The message's header information, however, will always show you the name as it was sent with the message. You can view any message's header by selecting it and choosing Internet Headers from the Message menu. The original display name will appear next to the To header.
Comments (12)
Thanks for the info. Does this feature make Entourage parallel to Outlook 2007 on Windows in terms of the "Display Name" field? In Entourage 2004 there is no such field.
Hi Russ!
Both Outlook and Entourage have First and Last name fields but neither has an editable "Display Name" field. (Correct me if I'm wrong about Outlook 2007.) The "Full Name" field in Outlook allows free-form editing of a name but, unfortunately, no version of Entourage has a similar field.
Hi, thanks. Actually, Outlook 2007 does have a Display Name field. When you start a fresh contact in Outlook, it autmoatically populates that field with the first and last name of the contact.
This, in turn, populates the Display Name field in Outlook Web Access and allows sent mail to appear with the recipient's real name, instead of just their email address. It's not a huge deal, but it makes things somehwat neater cosmetically and easier to scan.
Hi,
Is there anyway to disable this "feature"? I like it the way it was before.
_Tim
Nopers, but others have asked the same question.
Please be sure to let Microsoft know you'd like to see this feature changed in future versions by using the Help --> Send Feedback mechanism in any Office application or by visiting http://www.microsoft.com/mac/suggestions.mspx?product=entourage.
The problem I am having with this is that we are two individuals sharing our macbook pro and therefore, Entourage. Now that I have taken our email addresses out of the "me" entry, Entourage is using the name we used to register the software as our display name. The problem is that we each want our own display name to show up when we send emails from our respective email address.
I even tried creating a new identity in Entourage and got the same result.
Please help.
Test this first by sending an E-mail to yourself from Entourage and checking using webmail or Apple's Mail application, but you should be fine. The new feature is actually a change in appearance and not function. I don't believe it affects sent messages.
If I'm wrong and it is actually affecting your outgoing name, please let me know.
I have had a similar issue where a different email account than my reply-to appears in the from-field.
I discovered this is a Microsoft 'feature' that is primarily used to prevent spam.
See, I use gmail as my smtp server and have set it up so my reply-to address is the account I receive email on (I use a Penryn MacBook and need an smtp server while away from home since neither my ISP or my university allows remote smtp sending - again to prevent spam).
MS Outlook, Entourage etc, dispaly the Sent-From instead of the Reply-To field, which shows my gmail account.
This means I have sometimes missed messages in my gmail since I never use it to receive, only send. I had to add a filter to forward unexpected email, but I am unhappy with this since it means my contacts are confused by what address to use for me.
This is an awful "feature." I hope it goes away quickly (or, at least provide a way to turn it off).
thank you, thank you, thank you! 2 Days I've been looking for this "fix." I don't know why this site isn't the first google hit, but you're in my bookmarks now!
I was recently having email issues that people were replying
to one of my email messages and the incoming was addressed
to Dick but Entourage 2008 was changing the name to
Richard.
The problem was because I had one "Me" in my Entourage
Contacts for Richard with multiple addresses. The name
associated with any incoming mail was being changed to
the first name in my "Me" contact. I finally got around the
name problem by deleting all of the secondary addresses
from my primary "Me" contact and created a new contact
for Dick and assigned all secondary addresses to this contact.
It seems to be working okay and the only weird thing is
the "Make this Contact Me" is dimmed for both contacts.
There is a bigger issue here - it picks up the name of a group over the person's 'nickname' that you may have in contacts.
I work at a university and one of my clients has several groups / distribution lists - whenever they receive an email from an individual the name that shows up is the group name which is very confusing for the end user.
This feature is absolutely horrible - makes me wonder what Microsoft were thinking. I'll have no choice but to go back to 12.0.?? until they 'fix' this so called feature.