News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

December 9, 2006

tips

Fix ‘preferred’ email address for Address Book groups

Posted Dec. 9, ’06, 9:59 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Tips

Edit Distribution List...Well, those of you who didn’t enjoy my self-proclaimed stupidest-Address-Book-hack-ever yesterday, perhaps this will be more to your liking. As I browsed through some new AppleCare help documentation, I came across a feature of Address Book that not only had I never seen before, but also helped fixed a problem I’d been having.

I have a couple groups of friends set up as Address Book groups, so I can just pop that group name in Mail.app’s “To” field, but a number of my friends have accumulated multiple email addresses over the years for home, work, etc. A while back I started noticing that I had to change the addresses for some of them every time I used this group functionality, so I reverted to just typing in their names automatically.

Then I saw this AppleCare article: Mac OS X 10.4, .Mac: “Preferred” address not synced if contact is in an Address Book group. “‘Preferred’ address?” I thought. “What’s that about?” Skimming through, it quickly became apparent that it was the solution of my dreams.

Select a group in Address Book and choose “Edit Distribution List…” from the Edit menu and you’ll be given the option of selecting a default address for every member of that group by clicking on it (it’ll turn bold when you do). Problem fixed! Back to using groups for me.


2 Comments

Dave said:

Well, as the first one to deride your previous Mail tip. This is a good one. I don't use groups, but it's good to know.

December 10, 2006 10:40 AM
Boz Kay Author Profile Page said:

Thanks for this one. Been bugged by this for a while now.

December 12, 2006 6:20 AM

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