Is there a way to get this to work for the “To” field when sending a message? I’m sending a message to my work address, and I want to be sure that it is going to my work email address.
Currently. It is just showing my name in the “TO” field, and so I cannot see the recipient email address.
In “Viewing” settings, I have “x-envelope-from” in view, and "Use smart addresses disabled.
I don’t see any address display options in the “compose” field, but maybe there is an advanced setting that I’m missing.
When I compose a message, the names in the To field have a dropdown that shows the selected and available addresses for the name. If I select “edit” it will show the name and address in the To field.
Correct. So what I want to accomplish is to not have to click on anything in order to reveal the address. But rather, the recipient email address is displayed by default.
When I compose a message with “Use Smart Addresses” disabled, the recipient’s name and email address appear in the compose window as I would expect (I apologize for not noticing that you’ve already tried this setting); I don’t have to click a dropdown to reveal this information.
Is your work address in Contacts or just Previous Recipients? If not, maybe try adding it to Contact to see if it makes a difference.
Also, if recipients are in a directory service (e.g., Exchange, LDAP), I’m not sure whether Apple Mail would display their name and email address even if “Use Smart Addresses” is disabled. I’m not familiar with all of the intricacies of Apple Mail, so take this with a grain of salt.
It’s in contacts. It’s interesting that we do the same thing but get different results. I just composed a new message, made sure smart addressing was still off ( it was) , and it shows my name and not my email address.
Mail used to have a method to forget an address it had cached, which was a method to clear addressing errors or glitches like the one reported here. That feature is gone.
A workaround for misbehaving addressing in Mail is to create a new contact. Make it a “company”. Use a shortcut name for the company like “work” and enter your email address in that contact. In the To: line in mail type “work” (or whatever other shortcut name you used), and you be guaranteed to only get the address you want.
Another less complex fix is to delete your work address from your card in Contacts. Quit Contacts and Mail and address your address back to Contacts in the same or a new card. (You might need to reboot for force a sync between Contacts and Mail.)
In that article he links to an article from 2015 in which he wrote about how to do the same thing on MacOS. He says it still works although the UI looks different.
One issue that I have not verified but seems to happen on the Mac. Erase the previous recipients. Then, an hour or so later, they are back because evidently Mail scans your archives for email recipients.
