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"Hovering" over senders name to get e mail address can this be done?

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  • Last reply by johnoo

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I used to find it useful with Yahoo mail that I could "Hover" over a senders name to confirm an address was not spam. Tried to do this with T. Bird but it does not appear to work. Am I doing something wrong?

I used to find it useful with Yahoo mail that I could "Hover" over a senders name to confirm an address was not spam. Tried to do this with T. Bird but it does not appear to work. Am I doing something wrong?

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johnoo said

Zenos, Many thanks In my T.Bird Inbox E mails just show Subject/Correspondents/Date. How do I get it to show "Display name" from the Address book?

It is the default action. You have to turn it off, not on.

I should point out that the address in the header of the email has a gold star if it is in your address book. Given Thunderbird "collects" the addresses of everyone you email, the gold star should in itself be a pretty good clue the sender is known to you, rather than spam.

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Thunderbird goes about this in another way. You can set it to show the "display name" from your address book, which in itself is a pretty good guarantee that the sender's email address matches one you know and trust, so long as you are careful to curate your Address Book and keep it clean and uncontaminated by nuisance senders.

There are add-ons that force the sender's email address to be shown in the folder listing, such as your Inbox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/show-address-only/

I use another add-on that does this in the message header pane.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird/addon/eaimh/

In general, in an incoming message, if you hover over links the true link address or URL is shown in Thunderbird's status bar. However this capability does not seem to extend to email addresses.

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Zenos, Many thanks In my T.Bird Inbox E mails just show Subject/Correspondents/Date. How do I get it to show "Display name" from the Address book?

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Chosen Solution

johnoo said

Zenos, Many thanks In my T.Bird Inbox E mails just show Subject/Correspondents/Date. How do I get it to show "Display name" from the Address book?

It is the default action. You have to turn it off, not on.

I should point out that the address in the header of the email has a gold star if it is in your address book. Given Thunderbird "collects" the addresses of everyone you email, the gold star should in itself be a pretty good clue the sender is known to you, rather than spam.

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Matt said

johnoo said
Zenos, Many thanks In my T.Bird Inbox E mails just show Subject/Correspondents/Date. How do I get it to show "Display name" from the Address book?

It is the default action. You have to turn it off, not on.

I should point out that the address in the header of the email has a gold star if it is in your address book. Given Thunderbird "collects" the addresses of everyone you email, the gold star should in itself be a pretty good clue the sender is known to you, rather than spam.

Matt, Thanks, very good point about the Gold Star, gives my mind protection against spam.