On 9/8/06 5:46 PM, "Jan Martel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > OK, this makes me raise something that's been bothering me. For some reason > nicknames and even how you get email addresses in messages for contacts > don't work right for me. I have a contact whose first name is Joan. I email > her a lot. I have another contact whose first name is JoAnn. I don't email > her very often. *Every single time* I type joan into the "to" field, I get > JoAnn's email address. I've finally trained myself to use Joan's last name > instead. But WHY is it doing this?
Because it doesn't pay attention to capitalization (it's "case-insensitive"). "Joan" and "JoAn" are the same (which means you don't have to bother using Shift key at all, ever). Why is JoAnn always before Joan? Given that the first 4 letters are the same, Entourage will find whichever one comes first in its scanning of Address Book contacts. I'm not sure if that is in order of which contact was created first (has the lower ID in Entourage's database) or if it scans by alphabetical order of Last Name, as they appear in the Address Book. One or the other. >I thought it was supposed to default to > the person to whom you'd last sent an email, or the person from whom you'd > last received one. Why did you imagine that? In the case of contacts in the Address Book, it does not bother checking for that. If it did so, it would take 100 times as long. As well as checking the Address Book, it also checks the MRU list. That list is _formed_ and frequently _reformed_ by a complex protocol that does weight by frequency, as well as recentness, of correspondence. I don't know when exactly the MRU list is recompiled - whether it's just at startup (doubtful), every few minutes, when Entourage is not busy doing other things, or what. But it's very unlikely to be happening at the moment you start typing the characters for a recipient: once again, that would slow everything down. The prioritized list is already in existence when you start typing. And, in any case, it's irrelevant for contacts, it's only for non-contacts. > In a fit of pique at one point, I even gave Joan the > nickname Joan, but that didn't help. Of course it wouldn't. That's just the same person in the same location in the Address Book, using the same 4 letters and therefore the same search! Pick a DISTINCTIVE nickname - I'll try that again - a DISTINCTIVE nickname that does not use the same starting letters as any other contact's first name or last name or nickname. For example, "jn" or "TrueJoan", or "Dingbat" or anything else you will remember and which does not compete with another contact's name. Got it? -- Paul Berkowitz -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
