Things That Suck

Outlook with Hotmail

Initial posting: 2010-10-04

Outlook & Hotmail

If you use Outlook, one nice thing to be able to do is store all your contacts on a Hotmail account so the contacts can be accessed on several laptops running Outlook, and a wide variety of mobile devices, including iPhone.

Storing contacts on Hotmail is exactly the same as storing contacts in your local Outlook data file. You just need to add a Hotmail account using the Hotmail Connector which is free from Microsoft.

This convenience isn't without its problems, however. Often you want to use a custom name in the To: field. In Outlook, you can type in an alternate name in the "Display as" field. Here, I remove the middle name because not everybody in the recipient list needs to know the person's middle name.

Save the contact, perform a Send/Receive All to upload the new contact to Hotmail. Then compose a new mail by entering in "Doe" or "John", and ...

What the ... ?

I could have sworn I removed the middle name. It's back, though, according to the contact. For some reason, it doesn't save this "Display as" field in a Hotmail contact. Opening the contact confirms this.

Now, to get around this problem, I need to right-click the name that Outlook puts in there to open the contact.

Then I need to select the email address with the full name that it stuck in there and copy it.

I go back to the e-mail message, select the recipient that Outlook put in there, then overwrite it with a paste command.

Then I can delete the middle name.

Finally, I can send the mail with the name that I prefer, but it really shouldn't be this complicated.