Do you want people to be able to find your e-mails? Then please set your Display Name correctly!

By Display Name I’m referring to what your name shows up as when someone receives an e-mail from you. For example when I send someone an e-mail, they will see “Matt Inglot” as the sender of that e-mail. Straightforward enough. Unfortunately there is no real consistency in display name, so “Bob Rogers” might set his display name as:

• Bob Rogers
• Rogers, Bob
• Rogers Inc - Bob Rogers
• Bob Rogers (Rogers Inc)
• bob.rogers@bobrogersinc.com

Who cares? Those of us with a high e-mail volume do! Especially those of us stuck with Outlook rather than GMail (where search actually works). Typically to follow an e-mail from someone I will sort my inbox by Name and then try to find this person. This usually works great. If I’m looking for Bob Rogers I will look in the B’s and find him pretty quickly. Unfortunately if he used any variation of Display Name that didn’t start with B, suddenly finding him is a chore (especially if he started his name with something other than B and R).

See the problem? It gets worst when someone e-mails you from multiple addresses or multiple clients, which happens a lot. Now I might have e-mails from “Rogers, Bob”, “Bob Rogers”, and “Rogers Inc - Bob Rogers” all sitting in my inbox and all from the same conversation thread. Trying to find something in this mess becomes really hard!

So please. Take a couple minutes right now. Change your Display Name to “Firstname Lastname” format. It’s not a standard. But it’s what most people seem to use, so it’s got the greatest chance of catching on. Help us high-volume e-mail users find you.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 8:45 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.