gmailgoogle-contacts
When looking at my Gmail inbox some emails show the contact name in the from column and others just show an email address. The strange thing is that some of the ones that just show email address are ones that I do have their full name in my contacts.
When I highlight over the email address it shows the popup with their Contact card including their name and picture, etc.
Does anyone know why these just show up as email address and are not rendered as the person's name?
No Gmail will make a duplicate contact out of it, which you will have to merge 'manually'.
Luckily this is a very easy process, though it may take some time if you don't keep up with it.
Gmail even helps you find duplicates if their name doesn't change much. Else you just have to select them both and click [Merge]
(source: blogspot.com)
(source: blogspot.com)
It could be that your friend does not have her email account setup with the name field as I had a similar problem when working with an Organization that did not fill out their information within their email client.
Check the original (selecting the drop down menu where you can reply to a message or report) and see what comes up in the From: field. The RFC has conventions for sending the From header and her email client may not be executing properly.
The RFC calls it a mailbox
Normally, a mailbox is comprised of two parts: (1) an optional display name that indicates the name of the recipient (which could be a person or a system) that could be displayed to the user of a mail application, and (2) an addr-spec address enclosed in angle brackets ("<" and ">").
Of course all of this is on the assumption that she is not using Gmail
Check the user card that shows up when hovering over the email address, select the "More" drop down and go to "Contact Details" if the contact is a duplicate of the one you have saved, delete it.
Best Answer
Currently, Gmail always shows the contact information that is included in the mail. F.e. if someone sends you an e-mail from
"Foo Bar <foo@bar.com>", and you have that person in your contacts under the name"Lovely Fee <foo@bar.com>", it will still show the information Foo decided itself to include in the mail.I believe that there is a Userscript that changes this for you, but I cannot find it now.
This is a choice Gmail makes, probably to avoid ambiguity between contacts. Perhaps they will sometime decide to change this behavior.