A friend of mine was complaining to me this morning about a problem he was having with Address Book and Mail. While I couldn’t reproduce his exactly difficulty, it did lead me to another question: how do you create an alias for an address card? Let’s say, for example, that you have your parents in Address Book, listed by their full names, but you’d like to be able to type “Dad” or “Mom” into a Mail message, and have it recognized. My initial suggested fix was to put their full names into the Address Book entries and add “Mom” and “Dad” as nicknames. Unfortunately, Mail.app doesn’t recognize nickname fields.
Instead, I came up with the stupidest-Address-Book-hack-ever™. I made an Address Book group called “Mom” which contains only my mother’s address card and one called “Dad” which contains only my father’s address card. Then, entering “Dad” or “Mom” into Mail.app’s “To” field and hitting tab correctly resolved them to my parents’ addresses (though you won’t get the handy drop-down completion functionality you get from names and email addresses).
On the downside, using this fix does mean that your mother—who no doubt not only reads MacUser but lives it—will be pestering you to write her more often, now that it’s so easy.
Anybody know of any other, less stupid solutions for this?
Thanks so much. I keep forgetting my parents' names.
Yeah, really, talk about a waste of time.
If you only need Address Book for email, try switching from Mail.app to Thunderbird. I've been using it for years and, yes, it recognizes nicknames.
Yep, it's a stupid hack. But this was one of the biggest annoyances for me several years ago when I switched from Eudora to Address Book/Mail.app. I had my parents under "Mom" and "Dad," so my instinct was to address email to them that way, but it didn't work in Mail.app. The bigger question here is why doesn't Mail.app support nicknames or aliases?