Mail fails to recognize names from address book

I've been using Macs since 1988 and of all the complaints I have, the mail/address book issue is the worst. It is non-intuitive (counter to Apple philosophy) and riddled with dysfunction.

I can't use the adress book at all, even though I have the latest version of the OS. SOME addresses appear there, but not others, and it is impossible to add/delete addresses from my database.

Apple, please scrap it and rebuild a simple to use, intuitive, efficient address book/mail database.

There, I said it

I'm frustrated too with the current integration of the adressbook in mail.app.

If you compare two contacts (e.g. adressbook and mail.app) you should do that with the unique contact details (e.g. email adress, phone number).

Besides the known problem I experienced another inconsistency. Although the mail.app does not recognise the sender as already saved in my adressbook (it shows the name + emailadress and the option to save the contact in my adressbook "Zu Kontakten hinzufügen", it shows the correct contact-picture).

I don't think that Apple will change the current implementation since this behaviour is not new. Even though i hope they do because it's really anoying, especially if your contacts use different sender names when using different mail-accounts (e.g. company and private).

I experienced another issue:

In the new mail.app (6.1) you can use the 3-column-view.

One of my contacts used her email adress as her senders name ("xy@apple.com" <xy@apple.com>). The middle column (overview) shows her email adress instead of the name saved in the adressbook (like there is no match in the adressbook) but her correct contact photo (as saved in the adressbook). The right column (message detail) shows her name and her contact photo (as saved in the adressbook). Strange because it seems that in this case (email adress is also the senders name) the mail.app partly matches the adressbook entry (in the right column but not in the middle column).

Had this problem for a year. Have tried everything without effect.

If I type the email address, Mail will recognize and autocomplete. I can also click on the arrow at the end of the address and get it to open in Address Book. But if I type the name associated with that email address, Mail won't recognize it at all.

It's surprising that such a seemingly fundamental problem hasn't been fixed yet.

> It's surprising that such a seemingly fundamental problem hasn't been fixed yet.

Agreed. I have a rule that uses the "is in your address book" operator. It works most of the time, but not always. There are times when I can identify the difference in the "name" part of the address (but the email address is all it should be looking at) but sometimes to my eyes the entire name+address looks like the address book entry, but the rule does not fire.

For a company that prides itself of high-quality software, and usually hits this target, this is a very atypical problem.