Mail.app’s From Address Bug
Sunday, September 24th, 2006
John Cleary has noticed 
a fairly rare but annoying bug in the way that Mail.app handles From: email addresses.
As he points out:
In Mail.app (the standard mail client on OS X), if the person sending an email to you hasn’t specified a ‘from name’ in their email client (or webmail), the email will show up as being from their raw email address even if their name and email address is in your Address Book. Additionally, if the person has specified a ‘from name’ different from their real name (i.e. a nickname or screen name) then that will show up in the from column.
So you get odd things like this:
Obviously this is visually annoying and sometimes less than informative.
It also throws a spanner in the works when sorting emails by name.
John suggests that the solution is easy:
The Mail User Interface needs the ability to choose either to use Address Book names when there is no supplied ‘from name’ or to always use Address Book names regardless of supplied from name, matching instead on the email address.
It makes you wonder why is hasn’t been fixed.
Tags: annoyances, Apple Mail, bugs, From addresses, mail.app, sorting