Mac E-mail clients display wrong sender name on redirected messages from exchange server

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Mac E-mail clients display wrong sender name on redirected messages from exchange server

We were recently moved to Office 365 (Exchange) at my campus.

Things work pretty well, but one thing with Mac E-mail clients specifically really bugs me. This is true for both Mail.app and Outlook 2011 (and even the new Outlook 2015 in my limited testing).

In my department, we use Request Tracker (RT), a web-based help desk ticketing system. When a customer sends an E-mail to support, RT redirects/forwards that E-mail to all individual E-mails of help desk staff.

When using the Outlook Web Client, these redirected E-mails messages display the sender properly as they did before using Office 365’s Exchange server. For example, the sender name will be listed as "John Doe via RT” or if the sender is not in my address book it will be “john.doe@myuniversity.edu via RT”.

Now, if the E-mail client is left on all the time (and the Mac doesn't sleep), the sender name displays correctly, but if for example I turn off Mail.app over lunch, when I turn it on later, if there are messages from John Doe, Adam Smith, and Amy Appleseed, the three E-mails will display in the list as being from "John Doe via RT” (or whomever the first sender was). The content of the messages themselves is as it should be.

To add another wrinkle, in Outlook 2011 (not sure about Outlook 2015) the sender name within the preview pane matches the incorrect name in the messages list at the left, but in Mail.app the name displays correctly in the preview pane, but is still displayed incorrectly in the message list along the left side. ***?

It seems as if both Outlook and Mail.app are caching the address of the sender— support@mydept.myuniversity.com, as "John Doe via RT” (or whatever name comes first) and then if there are more redirected messages from support@mydept.myuniversity.com already on the exchange server it makes the incorrect assumption they are also from “John Doe via RT” presumably for the sake of performance.

I have tried re-syncing and rebuilding inboxes, which seems to make things worse. Emptying the folder cache in Outlook doesn’t help either. BTW, this same behavior happens on more than just my Macs.

Just wondering if anyone else has seen this problem or might have a solution.

Thanks,

Dave

About my environment:

Hardware: iMac 2009, MacBook Air 2013

OS: 10.10

E-mail clients: Mail.app, Outlook 2011/2015

Posted on Nov 16, 2014 5:04 AM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,252 points

Nov 16, 2014 5:41 AM in response to davepaar

I’ve only got a guess. Try turning off Smart Addresses in Mail.

Another guess. Do you have Organize by Conversation turned on? That may be grouping the items such that they appear to be from same person.

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Answer 2

Stud4you

Level 1

8 points

Nov 16, 2014 5:43 AM in response to Barney-15E

It said no services..

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Answer 3

davepaar Author

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1 points

Nov 16, 2014 7:40 PM in response to Barney-15E

I have tried both of those solutions, but neither has any effect.

Thanks for the response though.

-Dave

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Answer 4

Dec 22, 2014 9:58 AM in response to davepaar

I have the same problem with RT emails with Evolution/EWS on linux. It seems that the o365 server simply passes the wrong meta data with each message. This is an o365 bug, and not a client problem, as far as I can tell.

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Answer 5

davepaar Author

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1 points

Jan 9, 2015 4:50 AM in response to Yeonhyang

Just thought I would add that we still have this problem even with OS X 10.10.1. Also, would like to mention that we have no problems with RT messages on our Windows clients. Big surprise, I know.

Until/unless something is fixed, I am just using the Outlook Web App (OWA).

Thanks,

Dave

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Answer 6

Jan 12, 2015 2:07 PM in response to davepaar

Dave, I'm having the exact same issue you are having, and have been having it since the late developer previews of Yosemite. After the issue persisted into the final release of 10.10.0, I submitted bug report 18686226 to Apple. If you've got a developer account, I strongly recommend filing your own bug report and referencing mine, we will probably have better luck getting this resolved or at least narrowed down to a cause if Apple Engineering has two sources to pull information from. I've been working with both ZenDesk (our ticketing system) and Apple on this, and from what I've seen so far, the Exchange server is passing the correct message headers to the mail clients as they are the same as the message from the originating server, but it's being parsed incorrectly. The current theory is that the affected mail clients generate a dynamic contact for the sending address and inconsistently apply it to all messages, but that's still speculation at this point.

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Answer 7

davepaar Author

Level 1

1 points

Jan 12, 2015 8:11 PM in response to Benjamin Rush

Benjamin,

I have already submitted the bug and received confirmation that my report was a duplicate, so I don't know what else to do. Hopefully they get enough people complaining to get it fixed.

-Dave

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Answer 8

Jan 13, 2015 6:54 AM in response to davepaar

Did you submit the bug just recently? If so, that would explain Apple Engineering's renewed interest in my report in the past week. I also remember seeing someone else mention a similar issue on the Apple dev forums during the Yosemite beta period, I just went back and asked that person if they are still having the issue, or were able to get any info from Apple on it. Hopefully with a larger pool of data, Apple will be better motivated and able to find a resolution to this issue.

-Ben

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Answer 9

davepaar Author

Level 1

1 points

Jan 13, 2015 7:08 AM in response to Benjamin Rush

No, I sent my bug report in on November 18, 2014, but I got a reply from Apple that is was a duplicate of 18689247, so it was closed with no value.

It is encouraging that they seem to be interested in this.

-Dave

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Answer 10

Jan 22, 2015 5:17 AM in response to davepaar

Hi Dave -

We also have this problem at the University that I work for. We too are using RT and have zero problems with the Windows machines. I've not yet seen it on any of our Linux computers but in fairness most of our Linux computers are servers or research machines, not workstations.

I've seen this problem since Mavericks and was hoping it would be corrected when I did a clean install of Yosemite but it was not. Hopefully this will get corrected soon as I know there are others on our campus which are also frustrated with this bug.

-Matt

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Answer 11

davepaar Author

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1 points

Jan 23, 2015 6:14 AM in response to AthensMatt

Thanks for your input.

The weird thing is that the problem exists (in my observations) on both Outlook 2011 and Mail.app. You would at least think Microsoft's own client would not have this issue. Oh well, it's out of my hands.

-Dave

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Answer 12

Jan 29, 2015 9:03 AM in response to davepaar

I just found this thread when looking for a solution to the same problem.

For example:

In the list of messages says "Bob via RT", but the message is from "Mike". If I double-click the message to open it in a new window, it says "Mike via RT", but Apple Mail still shows "Bob via RT" in the list of messages.

It gets REALLY confusing seeing the wrong names on emails. We've already had one user reply to a message and address the person listed on the message, even though it was the WRONG person. They didn't know names would show up differently.

Exchange bug or not, this is all on Apple since it obviously is reading the correct name.

Why would Apple Mail show one name in one view but another name in the list of messages?

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Answer 13

marchs

Level 1

0 points

Feb 4, 2015 7:48 PM in response to davepaar

Same problem here too. RT, Office 365, Outlook, Yosemite.

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Answer 14

jurryt76

Level 1

0 points

Feb 8, 2015 12:38 PM in response to marchs

was there a solution for this? I am experiencing a very similar issue related to LinkedIn. Eg. a LinkedIn user sends me a message and Microsoft Outlook for Mac shows a different name in the email itself and inbox. This happens frequently and creates obviously a mess and confusion in my inbox. Same issue with Apple Mail.

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Answer 15

davepaar Author

Level 1

1 points

Feb 9, 2015 6:25 AM in response to jurryt76

No, the problem still exists. I was hoping that OS X 10.10.2 might fix it but in such luck. Seems like emoticons take precidence. Meanwhile, the Outlook Web App works well enough that I will just use that instead.

-Dave

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