Unlike the contact lists in other email clients, Mail.app can’t grab nicknames out of Address Book when auto-completing email addresses.

If your heart is set on using them, or if you have switched over from Eudora and never adjusted to their disappearance, here’s three things you could try:

1. Dan Moren has published a work-around on MacUser that involves creating an Address Book Group titled with the nickname and dropping the contact into the group. Mail.app will them find the nickname and auto-complete the email address.
2. Another option is making that contact into a company with the nickname as the company name and placing the person’s real name underneath:
   

3. Grieve the passing of nicknames for an appropriate period and then get over it. After all, most people with nicknames also have first names that Mail.app can easily find and match. It’s not such a big deal.

UPDATE: As Howard explains in the comments, Quicksilver has no problems with nicknames, so you can use it to start an nickname-friendly email:

mail.app, apple mail, address book, contacts, nicknames, tips, workarounds, group, company

David Carpe of Gmail Pro and passingnotes emails to say what an excellent app Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is, and how easily it helped him to move from Eudora for Windows to Mail.app on his new Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro.

In short, he says, Andreas Amann’s app is “flawless, perfect”, although he takes the opportunity to point out a few things.

In particular, he recommends patience:

The first part—dragging it all, setting up folders, etc, and then dragging the whole ‘Eudora folder’ onto the cleaner only took about an hour or so, but the script to rebuild boxes can take longer. It took me a couple of hours. Do NOT interrupt it. My advice is to turn off all other programs and just walk away and let it do it’s thing.

Secondly, he notes something specific to Eudora for Windows switchers:

For nicknames: Many Eudora for Windows users will be scratching their heads about ‘nndbase.txt’ in the instructions as it doesn’t exist in the new version. It’s actually a different file type. I pinged Andreas about this. What I did (and yes, this worked flawlessly) was drag the entire Eudora for Windows into the folder that I had created called ‘eudora folder’ (as per Andreas’ instructions). Then when I dragged that whole thing onto the cleaner the dialogue box popped up. I simply deselected everything except ‘import nicknames’ and voila, they were all inside my address book within about two minutes. I did this last, after doing all of my mail and attachments.

Anyone reading this and teetering on the edge, might like to know that Eudora Mailbox Cleaner also does a terrific job for people coming over from Thunderbird.

I’m not going to make any snide remarks about someone who runs a Gmail site switching to Mail.app. No, not one.

I’ll just join with him and many others in thanking the developers who make such great plugins and utilities available to normal users like me. Mail.app wouldn’t be half the app it is without them, and they don’t get thanked enough.

Soppy, but true.

“Thank you a million times over, Andreas,” David says.eudora for windows, thunderbird, mail.app, apple mail, gmail, email, switching, nicknames, kiss a developer day

Andreas Amann has updated his very useful Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, a utility that simplifies the process of switching from Eudora or Thunderbird to Mail.app.

In particular, the app is much smarter about importing Eudora nicknames and much better at parsing them. It no longer identifies some nicknames as mailing lists. The whole importing process is much faster.

A number of smaller tweaks make EMC more stable, especially during the initial scan of files to be imported.

There has never been a better time to switch from Eudora.

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is freeware (donations not refused) and is available from Andrea’s web site.mail.app, apple mail. eudora, thunderbird, switching, importing, nicknames, plugins, helpful apps

Andreas Amann has updated Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, an app which can import emails into Mail.app from Eudora and Thunderbird.

The new version resolves aliases and symbolic links within the Eudora folder and the target folder hierarchy and improves the reading of binary data from Eudora mailboxes.

A new AppleScript is included in the disk image which will rebuild all the imported messages within Mail.app 2.x’s “Import” hierarchy.

It also improves the importing of nicknames from Eudora.

It is not yet a universal binary, but the app runs fine in Rosetta.

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is free (donations not refused) and is available from Andreas’ web site.