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Outlook 2013 (as well as earlier versions) has a quick reading pane that shows a brief preview of a message. It includes the sender name, first N lines from the message, and sent date (by default).
What controls the string that appears in the Sender portion. In case there is doubt as to what I mean by Sender portion, it's within the box highlighted in red in this screenshot:
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I have done a lot of experimentation, and it appears to not come from any of the message headers themselves (I have tried every combination of Return-Path, From, and Sender headers). I should note that the Sender address does appear correctly on the right side of the reading panel, which shows the full message (under the uppermost blacked out solid box in the screenshot). There appears to be some metadata in the PST file itself that includes this Sender name. Can anyone point me to a reference, or otherwise help me ensure this field is populated correctly in a generated PST file?
Jeff Evans
Posted 2014-01-28T22:47:29.823
Reputation: 141
What makes you say that it doesn't come from the 'From' header? – zelanix – 2014-01-28T23:08:09.663
You can test this easily. If you have an SMTP account and you change the 'Full Name' field in outlook and send a test message it will show up with the name entered there. – zelanix – 2014-01-28T23:11:01.487
When I open the full message headers in Outlook, the
Fromheader is there and it is populated. So areReturn-PathandSenderfor that matter. But Outlook does not display it on the left part of the quick reading pane. – Jeff Evans – 2014-01-28T23:11:17.603This is not from Exchange, but rather from a PST file generated by the Aspose Email API product. I have also asked the question on their forums, but I suspect this question should have an answer independent of how the PST file was created. – Jeff Evans – 2014-01-28T23:13:31.003
Ok, so now you're asking a different question I think! When Outlook receives a message it will store it to the pst file using whatever is in the 'From' header but then it will read the data from the pst file without reparsing the message each time. While third party tools may enable the storing of a different 'From' name in the pst file, this is nothing to do with Outlook. – zelanix – 2014-01-28T23:17:39.197
So basically, I think that you are right, the value is probably stored in the pst file, but I don't know the details and I don't think that it would be possible to correct it as such. If this is an imap email account you could remove it from outlook and re-sync it. – zelanix – 2014-01-28T23:18:59.420
@zelanix, you say I'm asking a different question now. Can you suggest how I edit the question to make it clear I'm asking about the PST file metadata specifically? I thought it was pretty clear already but if not then I can certainly change it. – Jeff Evans – 2014-01-29T17:44:05.847
Basically I think that your question makes it sound like this is something to do with how Outlook processes incoming messages etc. When the problem here (I believe) is that you have a third party tool which has generated a pst file that behaves differently to what you expect. I think that the question should be asking for a tool or procedure that will correct the pst file based on the messages stored in it. Does this make sense? Actually, I suspect that you will be best off posting a new question now rather than editing it. – zelanix – 2014-01-29T18:22:15.013