Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!

Mail ignores multiple email addresses in Address Book Apps
When I use Address Book, occasionally I have groups that I want to make from other groups. The only problem is that sometimes the subgroups overlap -- i.e. the same person is within both subgroups. That would be annoying for that user if I use the big group, because they would get the same e-mail twice.

Well, it WOULD be annoying if Mail / Address Book weren't so smart. When using a big group in Mail, it automatically strips duplicate e-mail addresses. Convenient!

I believe this also works when manually addressing e-mails and across To/Cc/Bcc fields (it won't appear as such, but when you actually send the mail, it won't send duplicates out to those addresses that have been put in the fields more than once). I'm not sure if this is a feature of my mail server or of Mail/Address Book, but it sure does save me time of manually making big groups.

[robg adds: I think it's a Mail feature, as a quick test sending a to and cc to another of my accounts (listing the account twice in each field). I only received one email.]
    •    
  • Currently 1.00 / 5
  You rated: 1 / 5 (3 votes cast)
 
[5,975 views]  

Mail ignores multiple email addresses in Address Book | 4 comments | Create New Account
Click here to return to the 'Mail ignores multiple email addresses in Address Book' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Mail ignores multiple email addresses in Address Book
Authored by: anakin on Oct 22, '03 11:21:37AM

Mail doesn't strip it. It is a function of the SMPT protocol. You could have the same email address listed in every field and the recipient would still only get one.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Mail ignores multiple email addresses in Address Book
Authored by: anakin on Oct 22, '03 11:22:58AM

Small typo there on my part SMTP, not SMPT. :)



[ Reply to This | # ]
Mail ignores multiple email addresses in Address Book
Authored by: Trunkmonkey on Oct 23, '03 04:33:27PM

Depends on the SMTP server. My sendmail server strips parses all the headers and makes sure each user only gets a single copy while my qmail server dutifully delivers multiple copies.

It also depends on alias expansion. Say security@foo.com is an alias for sean@foo.com. If email is sent To: security@foo.com and Cc: sean@foo.com, sendmail will parse headers upon deliver, expand the aliases and only deliver one copy. Again, qmail does the dumb thing and blindly delivers to each address separately.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Mail ignores multiple email addresses in Address Book
Authored by: unforeseen:X11 on Oct 22, '03 01:59:22PM

well, it wouldn't be too much work to implement such a feature (if it wasn't provided by the SMTP), now was it? ;-)



[ Reply to This | # ]