Setting a default email address in Address Book
In a follow-up to his excellent “Making Mac Mail Work for You” article on LowEndMac, Ed Eubanks publishes some feedback from the original article.
One of the user comments contained a tip that was news to me: how to set a default email address for an
The answer is tucked away in a submenu. In Address Book select “Edit Distribution List…” from the Edit menu.
You will be presented with a screen like this:
Selecting an email address from the list next to each contact turns it bold. That address becomes the default one for Mail.app, but only when the contact is selected as part of an Address Book Group.
Tags: Address Book, Apple Mail, contacts, default, email address, mail.appRelated posts
December 12th, 2006 at 1:01 am
It seems that this tip only works when sending to a group which includes the contact. When entering the person’s name in Mail, the default address is not automatically chosen as first option. In fact, the mail address top of the list in Mail seems arbitrary to me. I have tried to influence this, but with no success to date.
December 12th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
Yoram is correct. I have sent this to Apple feedback multiple times. It drives me crazy.
December 17th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
My “Set Primary Addresses” Address Book plug-ins, available free from my website, might also be of help here. They provides a user interface to examine and change the “primary” tag that Apple uses in the internal Address Book database.
Some users have reported that the address marked as primary becomes the default when adding the address to a group. My own (limited) testing seems to confirm this. So the plug-ins could save you from setting the address separately for each group. Like the “Edit Distribution List…” menu item, the plug-ins work for phone numbers and street addresses as well as email.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t affect the default email used for the person when you type their name directly into a message. Like those who have commented above, I would love to find a way to control this.
June 8th, 2008 at 12:47 am
It’s complete madness that Apple neglect little, but important, things like this!