Outlook/Exchange - Changing display of “From” user

[William Yeack]

This has been plaguing me for awhile. I am using Outlook 2013 with my own Exchange Server.

When I receive an email from a contact, it is displayed in the way prescribed by their mail server. So if someone sets their username to "smith, JohNny", then this is what I see in my inbox.

I would like to make it so that when I receive an email, Outlook attempts to display the email using the "Display As" field of a contact saved in my contacts folder.

The one workaround that I have found is to create a "Contact" in exchange and add the person's email and proper display name. This seems to work flawlessly, but it does not help for my email accounts where I do not have admin control over Exchange (such as my work email).

What is the best solution here? This seems like it should be the default behavior of Outlook -

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Unfortunately, that is the only way to do it - Outlook will always use the display name the sender used. When you use Exchange, it pulls from the Active Directory and uses the AD name.

It could probably be done using a macro and redemption, but it could be slow (and addin would be faster). If you get a lot of mail, some won't be processed. Unfortunately, I don't have any code samples.

 

[William Yeack]

Thanks Diane!
Do you have any good resources to learning how to create an addin? I am very good with C# - I just need to figure out how to access the API, etc.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Start over at Dmitry's site - http://dimastr.com/redemption/home.htm - you'll need redemption unless you want to work with ExtendedMapi directly. He has a lot of examples there. MSDN and the MSDN Outlook programming forum is a good resource too.