Getting Kaddress toAdd a Name to an Email Address

 

This one drives me crazy! Here's
the scenario: I already have the
person's email address but not their
name in my address book. Should be
a simple matter of adding their name,
right?

Well, not quite. Seems that kaddress
will not recognize the full name unless
it is called a simple name. Not
sure why this is.

Here's what I do to tweak things so that
the name shows up along with the email
address when I click To: to designate
who I will be sending the email to.

1. Get into Kmail
2. Find the tools menu
   at the top of your screen
3. Click on tools
4. A drop-down menu appears
5. Choose Address Book
   from the drop-down menu
6. The address book now appears
7. Look for email icons, some of which
   have a name underneath them and some
   which don't. Since your problem is
   getting a persons first and last name
   to appear, you want to focus on email
   icons that do not have a name underneath
   them
8. Click on the orphan email address
   that has not yet been given the name
   of a person
9. Enter the Firstname Lastname
   next to Edit Name. Do so in
   Firstname Lastname (natural) order.
10. Now click on Edit Name
11. Change the pull-down menu to Simple
12. Important! Click on another email address
    in the other window to make sure that the choice
    of Simple will be applied. Any email
    address will do as long as it is not the email
    address you are working on.
13. At this point, an the icon for the email
    address you are working on should appear with
    the name of the person underneath it. Look for
    this name by scanning the icons in alphabetical
    order. The big change you are looking for is
    an icon that did not have a name underneath
    it before that now has a name underneath
    it.
14. Now click the email icon that now has
    a name under it that it did not have before.
    In effect, you are clicking away from a random
    email address you used to make sure everything
    is working OK and clicking towards the email address
    you are working on.
15. Start to compose an email
16. Check that the when you click
    on To: that you are able to
    get the full name, and not just the
    email address alone, added to the
    To: field

How did I learn out how to do this?
I looked at the raw data for the
address book.

Here is where the raw data is found:

~/.kde/share/apps/kabc/std.vcf

I looked at the file with the
vim editor. I noticed
that not all the fields were
being filled in when I added
a name to an existing email
address in the address book.
From there, I started looking
for a work-around and I developed
the above steps.

I'm not absolutely sure why the
above steps work. However, they
seem to work for me.

Ed Abbott