Forum Discussion
Outlook/Office 365 loads wrong display name on To: field.
Hi Community,
This is an annoying problem that has been happening where I work. It's not critical, but would be good to be able to fix it.
We use Office 365 and have Outlook installed on all user PCs (win7). When typing the destination email/name on To: field, you will see the correct name [Berni..] and email [accounts@..] on the autocompletion list (picture outlook_01.png). However, after hitting <Enter> it will fetch a wrong name [Rachel..] (from the former employee that used that email, but no longer belongs to our organization) (picture outlook_02.png).
If you double-click the name [Rachel..] (picture outlook_03.png) you'll see that both name and email are actually correct. Just the display name that its messed up. If you send the email, it will go to the right mailbox as well.
What I want to accomplish: To see the proper name [Berni..] on the To: field after selecting the mail item from the autocomplete list.
What I tried to do so far:
- local contacts overriding global contacts: checked but it's not the case, and the problem is happening on multiple computers
- user profile on O365 admin panel/ exchange: checked, no evident problems. (picture outlook_04.png the forum only allows 3 attachments)
- deleted autocompletion entries (single and everything). The same thing happens.
I'm thinking of deleting the mailbox and creating it again, but
1) There will be no fun
2) I would need to backup everything before. As it's a huge mailbox (and it will take a lot of time to do that), I'm hoping that a good soul out there with a trick under their sleeve would suggest me a better approach to fix the problem.
Please let me know if you need any other info and thanks in advance for any replies.
Cheers! :-)
50 Replies
Hi Community. First of all, I'd like to thank you all for your time and replies.
Secondly, I'm not sure if I should be happy or not, but the problem seems to have fixed itself. (!!!)
One of the users came to me this morning and reported that the names were ok now. I tested on few PCs and surprisingly, everything seems to be working as expected.
I didn't do anything new to the exchange configuration, so I have no idea of what happened here. I guess this is one of those mysteries that will remain on *the cloud*.
Well, in the case I get any new information over this, I'll reply to this post.
For now, thank you all and have a good day. :-)
Cheers.
Raf
- Hi there,
Just an update from here as well. My problem seems to have resolved itself as well, over a week later.
Every time we change the name, there is some time lag that the users find disconcerting. Usually the lag in the name change is about a day, but this time it was a week. In future, we are just not going to rename the account. We will create a new account from scratch and copy the mails to that account if needed.
Amazing that something so simple cannot be go right.
thanks to fellow posters.In our instance, this behaviour has persisted. It's been one year since the previous Sarah left the office. The new Sarah shows up with the old Sarah's last name when typing her first name into the To field in Outlook. If I click the To box and specifically search the Global Address List (instead of the offline copy), I still see the wrong last name.
I don't think this problem is going to fix itself.
Do I need to create a new Outlook profile on everybody's computer?
- hi rafael,
i have a concern with you related to your issue.
is this issue with any particular user or for all in your domain.
thanks
kiran.Hi Ravi kiran, thanks for your reply. This is happening to all users that try to send an email to the user "Berni". Once we click [verify name] on outlook client, the name changes to "Rachel", however, the address won't change at all. So the message goes to the right destination (at least).
Following this thread. We are having the exact same issues at my company. I am new to the IT dept and we are trying to figure out a fix to no avail.
It has stopped doing this now for us. I have our users submitting tickets to me when they notice as some names were not updated prior to me being the Admin. I update in O365 and then I tell the users to make sure to clear out their name by selecting the X next to the older person's name.
Then I tell them to update their address book settings to Global rather than offline.
This has helped as I have not had any complaints for a few months now.
Things I've tried:
- Checking that the settings are right in the admin portal.
- Click the x beside the remembered name in the TO: field.
- Shut down Outlook, remove the autocomplete files completely, restart Outlook.
As a test I left the existing Outlook profile in place, and through Control Panel | Mail created a separate profile called Temp which I configured with the same settings as the original user. When I open this profile, the changed user's name appears correct all the time.
So from my experience it is an issue with the local profile, not with the settings in the admin portal. New profiles do not have the problem. But something in the "memory" of the old profile has hard coded the old name to correspond with that email address.
Hmmmm. It's showing the wrong name on old and new employees...however, their email addresses are recycled so I guess they're not NEW employees just name is changed.
Any chance you could upload that fourth picture showing the Exchange settings in the Admin panel?
Hi Hal_Hostetler, here's the requested picture. I did check the other options under the user profile, but all fields are empty.
Same BS here.
Made the fatal mistake of changing the username when one user left, so that the new user could have access to the old mails. I type in the full name of the user in the TO: field of another user (on the same domain) as peter@mydomain.com and it automatically changes to the name of the old user.
I've already wasted about three hours on this. The only thing that I have found that rectifies the situation is to remove the profile and create a new one. So if you rename a user, you have to recreate everybody else's profile so that they can see the updated user's name. Well done again Microsoft.
Hi Jonathan Stone Same here, just took over previous IT person and I changed contact name and alias through office 365 , and I could log in the account smoothly, while other users trying to send me an email, the information still shows the previous people's contacts information and I couldn't search new name in global contacts as well. However, when I searched the old person's name it's showing there with new email address alias. I have left this there for 2 days, still no changed. Have checked exchange as well, all information has updated. So frustrating about it.
