Avoid unintended recipient issues in Mail

Jul 27, '07 07:30:03AM

Contributed by: robg

OS X's Mail program uses auto-completion in an email's address fields -- type Sall and Mail will grab the email address for Sally Sample. Most of the time, this is good as it saves typing. However, when you have two contacts with similar names, things can get troublesome. In my case, I have a very good friend who shares the same first name, and a very similar last name, with my manager at Macworld. In the past, when sending messages to either of them, I had to type a few letters of the person's name, then wait for Mail to drop down its list of matches and select the one I wanted to send the message to. This was not only annoying, it also took more time than I'd like, given how often I email both of them.

Then I remembered that Mail can also auto-complete based on groups in Address Book. So I created two new groups in Address Book -- one called da boss and another called WRX (my buddy's car). I then dragged the boss' name from the All listing to the first group, and my buddy's name to the second group.

Back in Mail, if I address a new email to da b, Mail auto-completes with my boss' email address. If I address it to WRX instead, Mail auto-completes with my buddy's email address.

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