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Display contact name in "To" field

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 6 views
  • Last reply by david

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FYI I am an IT guy and this question describes behavior on a brand new, Windows 11 PC, with a fresh install of the latest version of Thunderbird as of the date of writing, 102. I'm not a daily TB user, this is for a client of mine switching from Windows Live Mail.

When composing an email, I can type someone's name in the field and it will display the list of email addresses of contacts with this name. e.g. I can type "Frank" and it will display all the emails of any Frank in my contacts. But it doesn't display their name, just the email. My client would like to be able to see the names because of course lots of people don't have their full names in their email address. They have a few hundred contacts we imported from their old computer and doesn't remember everyone's email.

I've checked the contacts and they have the "First Name", "Last Name", and "Display Name" fields filled out, so I don't think it's an issue of an empty field. I enabled the "Contact Sidebar" as a workaround but would like to be able to fix this for them. It seems like a completely reasonable feature to expect to be built in to me.

I've looked through past posts and have seen this question posted before but without an answer. So I thought I'd try again. Is there a way to do this either natively or with an add-on?

FYI I am an IT guy and this question describes behavior on a brand new, Windows 11 PC, with a fresh install of the latest version of Thunderbird as of the date of writing, 102. I'm not a daily TB user, this is for a client of mine switching from Windows Live Mail. When composing an email, I can type someone's name in the field and it will display the list of email addresses of contacts with this name. e.g. I can type "Frank" and it will display all the emails of any Frank in my contacts. But it doesn't display their name, just the email. My client would like to be able to see the names because of course lots of people don't have their full names in their email address. They have a few hundred contacts we imported from their old computer and doesn't remember everyone's email. I've checked the contacts and they have the "First Name", "Last Name", and "Display Name" fields filled out, so I don't think it's an issue of an empty field. I enabled the "Contact Sidebar" as a workaround but would like to be able to fix this for them. It seems like a completely reasonable feature to expect to be built in to me. I've looked through past posts and have seen this question posted before but without an answer. So I thought I'd try again. Is there a way to do this either natively or with an add-on?

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I've done some testing on my own computer. And it does behave the way I'm looking for from some dummy contacts I made. I made a bunch of "Bob <random last name>" contacts and when I type "Bob" into the to field it does display both the name, and the email address. So the issue seems to only occur on contacts I imported from a .csv. This isn't my first rodeo and I was sure to line up the field mapping correctly.

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Does changing the setting at Tools>general for 'Show only Display Name for people in my address book' help?