I use Gmail. When it displays an email from someone, it puts their name at the top. Sometimes, this is totally wrong, eg:
The person has "jo" in their email, and signs the email "Jo", but Google thinks they're called "Patricia". Their email isn't a gmail account.
Where does this data come from? It's annoying as it's all too easy to write "Hi Patricia…" in the reply and then sometimes people get annoyed saying "My name's not Patricia, it's Jo!".
Can this functionality be switched off?
EDIT – on examining the original text of the email, I can see this in the headers: Note the first in particular.
From: Patricia Wood <joj2wood@xxxxxx.com>
Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable
MIME-version: 1.0 (1.0)
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 17:18:21 +0000
Subject: Three Little Birds
Message-id: <E165616C-BE55-4E16-9298-68BD219693E5@xxxxxx.com>
To: helpdesk@example.com
X-Mailer: iPad Mail (15D60)
X-Original-Sender: joj2wood@xxxxxx.com
So, I'm guessing the "Patricia Wood" bit is something that is added by their email client?
Best Answer
View the details of the message so you can see the raw headers. Is the name as shown there? Then the sender is sending the message with the wrong name associated.
If not, then you have a contact with that name and that email address. I've found that if two people have the same email address, but I have two different contact records for them, then the one who shows up first alphabetically will be displayed as the sender name, no matter what may be in the headers or who actually sent it.