Home Forums Mac Software Mac Operating Systems Addressbook - change order of fields

A friend of mine gave me his home email address, which I added to his card which already had his work email address.

I tried to send an email to an addressbook group that he was a member of, and it added him using the work address, which is not what I wanted. I opened addressbook and was unable to find a way to fix that behavior. I assume group mailing uses the first email address on each card, but I can't find a way to change the order - drag and drop seems intuitive but nothing I tried worked.

So how do I change the order of those addresses? Or am I forced to delete the top one, and add it again below the other one? This looks like an easy way for me to accidentally lose an address.

Why not add the top one again below the other one before deleting it?

I haven't got much to work with, because I've only got one person in Address Book with multiple e-mail addresses, but their 1, 2, 3 AB order comes up 3, 1, 2 in the pane that pops up when I hit Mail's AB icon, and I can't divine the logic behind the change in order.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the address that defaults to #1 hasn't been used in at least two years, if ever, which suggests...errr...something?

Edit 2: Also, of the three, the only one in "Previous Recipients" is #2.

Edit 3: Now this gets weird... I deleted #2 from "Previous Recipients," and it became #1 when accessed from Mail, with AB's #1 & #3 becoming Mail's #3 & #2, respectively. (Does that make sense?)

Because I shouldn't have to?

It's like I'm complaining I'm having problems turning my car left, and you're recommending I just make three right turns whenever I want to go left. Lets see if we can find a solution before falling back to looking for workarounds

I'm not recommending anything. You expressed concern about the possibility of losing data, and I pointed out a technique to ensure that that doesn't happen. For all I know, you didn't try adding a redundant field first. I did, and it's doable even if not intuitive.

As for group emails using the first listed address, that doesn't appear to be the case for me (OS X 10.5.8). Like artie, I don't have a lot of contacts with multiple Address Book addresses, but in my experiments, group emails always used the same addresses regardless of order, designation (work, home, etc.), or even creation date. No telling what determines which addy is selected, although my limited sample doesn't rule out the possibility that it's plain old alphabetical order at work.

That's all moot in any case, because if, while in Address Book with the group in question highlighted, you right-click and choose Edit Distribution List… from the contextual menu, you can choose which address will be used in group emails.

> That's all moot in any case, because if, while in Address Book with the group in question highlighted, you right-click and choose Edit Distribution List… from the contextual menu, you can choose which address will be used in group emails.

Uhhh... That's answer for which V1 was looking in the first place...before you suggested all those left turns. ("So how do I change the order of those addresses?")

And here it is from the horse's mouth:

AddressBook 5.0 Help: Selecting addresses for group members.

No, artie, it was not. If you're going to be splitting hairs, "So how do I change the order of those addresses?" was the wrong question to be asking, but it was the question I addressed in my first post. The correct question would've been, "So how do I choose the address I want used in a group email?"

If you want to give me a hard time for failing to recognize that fact immediately, consider yourself tarred with the same brush. At least I found a solution.

Thank you, that solves the immediate problem. My first priority was to get the group mailings fixed. Changing the order of the emails in individual contacts I thought was the only way to fix that so that's where I was focusing. I had no idea that group option existed.

ok this has a lot of ouch in it. Whilst shuffling my cards and updating some addresses I think I found a nasty bug in addressbook.

I have a card with an email address and a nickname. The email address I know is not this person's primary, so I emailed them to get current. They replied back to me with their full name, using their primary address.

So I clicked the arrow on the from entry and clicked to "update" the card. I opened addressbook to review the updates, and was surprised to find that the only occurrence of him was what appeared to be a new card, there was no trace of his previous (non primary) email address in my addressbook. (I had sent the original email using his previous entry in AB)

Shrugging, I found my sent item and clicked on his TO and selected to add to addressbook which it did. I now have two cards for him, one with a nick and old email, and one with a name and new email.

I located those two cards in addressbook and selected both, and went to the Merge Cards option. AB merged the cards together, and again wiped the older card's email address.

It appears that when AB or mail merges card data, it overwrites email addresses instead of creating a single card with multiple addresses.

> "failing to recognize that fact immediately"

Oh... Excuse me for falling victim to your reputation for being an insightful reader.

But back to the chase...

There appears to be a bug that prevents your solution from being a solution...

Assuming that I'm not misunderstanding V1's question and your response: In OS X 10.6.8/Mail v 4.5 I'm finding that, almost invariably, quitting/relaunching Mail will result in the selected e-mail address (returned by hitting Address (icon) > "Group" > "Contact" in a new e-mail) for people with multiple addresses being changed (although the selected address in Address Book > "Group" > Edit Distribution List... > "Contact" remains unchanged). (I had one such contact and created a second one for test purposes.)

Further, and cosmetic as opposed to affecting functionality, the order in which the multiple e-mail addresses are presented by both Mail and Address Book aren't always the same after quitting/relaunching, but I haven't been able to determine a pattern to the change.

Now that we've laid bare my lack of insight, I won't even make a pretense of understanding your approach to Virtual's issue.

You've reported on the order of addresses in Address Book, on the order of addresses in Mail's address book, on potential relationships between these and the absence or presence of addresses in Previous Recipients, and on selected addresses in Mail's address book and the apparent lack of connection between these and the chosen address in the Distribution List; but as far as I can tell, you have yet to mention a single instance of actually addressing a group email.

Unless any of the actions you've undertaken actually affect which address Mail uses when sending a group email, your reporting all falls into the category of "Mail and Address Book anomalies." And if any of those actions do affect which address is used, that fact certainly doesn't emerge from a reading of your posts (at least not to someone as lacking in insight as me).

Such subtle fickle behavior we have here. In my brief testing just now it appears that Previous Recipients List is queried when entering an address, PRL keeps a note of the last time you've used a given address. When I start to type in a person's name, I get a list of 6 entries, with the person I want showing up in two of them, once for each email address. I see no method to the madness in the order they are listed. They are not alphabetized by first name, last name, email address, order added to addressbook, or order of last mailed to.

OK I think I may see the pattern. They appear to be sorted first by nickname, second by name (last,first) which matters mainly for all the cards without nicknames, third by last used day. I think. That's a lot of variables to process and I don't have big enough sample sizes to say for sure.

But in the end when I get it down to a single person with more than one email address, the most recently sent to is the one selected that I can just hit [return] on.

So when you say "last selected" it's not quite that, it's last used. I tried changing selections with drafts repeatedly without it affecting offered order.

"Huh!!!" would have been equally expressive and far more eloquent.

Under any circumstances, though, I backtracked and, step by step, documented what I did, and I discovered that Mail 4.5's "Address" pane is, indeed, quirky, and/or unintuitive, and/or buggy, and that that behavior had led me to an erroneous conclusion.

The procedure you described (and documented with your link) for setting and entering the primary e-mail addresses of members of a group works as expected, but, without getting into the guts of a(n) outdated deprecated version of Mail, selecting a single member of a group and hitting command-A > To:/Cc:/Bcc: does not necessarily result in the entry of the same set of addresses as does your procedure, as seems to me to be intuitive.

Sorry for any confusion.

My response to dk clarifies my earlier post to a degree.

Mail's sort algorithm is, indeed, pretty obscure; I can't even divine it as respects a contact with three e-mail addresses, none of which is in PRL. (The only obvious sort is by what follows the @s.)

I wonder if Mail caches address usage somewhere and draws on the cache for sorting?

Mails' address book's interface isn't particularly intuitive in Mail 3.6 either.

In my experiments, selecting the group name when only a single group member's name was highlighted, then clicking To: (or simply double-clicking the group name), resulted in only that single member's address being added to the new message.

Selecting all names in the group, then clicking To: or double-clicking the group name, added the addresses of all members of the group; when I selected that member's other address and then used Command-A to select the entire group, clicking To: or double-clicking the group name worked as expected, addressing the message to all group members but with that multi-address member's other address included instead of the preferred one.

Since clicking To: or double-clicking the group name when some but not all of the members' names are highlighted results in a message addressed only to the highlighted recipients, though, I concluded that there must be more straightforward ways to address group emails than selecting the group name and then ensuring that all individual member names are highlighted. And indeed there are.

Just type the group's name in the new message's To: field to bypass Mail's address book altogether. Or, using Mail's address book, click on All in the Group column, then click on the group name again; this will have the effect of deselecting any selected names, which is functionally identical to selecting them all (and will restore the preferred address of any recipients for whom you've temporarily selected an alternate address).

Better still, though, in my opinion, is to customize your Message Viewer window (Mail -> View -> Customize Toolbar…) to include the address book icon. Then you can simply click that icon and double-click the group name; a new message will open, pre-addressed to all members of the group.

Edit: Forgot to mention that you can also do it another way. With a new message and Mail's address book open, simply drag the group name to the message's To: field. This will add the entire group to the message, regardless of which members happen to be selected at the time. (That clicking To: with the group name selected or double-clicking the group name can result in a very different set of addresses than dragging the group name to the message's To: field is an interface inconsistency so non-intuitive that I think it has to be regarded as a bug.)