you have the email address in your address book twice.

You have two address books. Check them both.

Checked, checked, checked... it is only there once. However it is in several different address books.

In addition to the information that I posted to open this thread, this email account is running on 4 machines, an iMac, Airbook, Hp Desktop (win7), and an Asus laptop (win7). This problem only happens on the Asus laptop.

Chet

I have 7 address books listed when I click the Address Book in TB. I have checked all of these (all have a common source - from GMail) and have checked them all for entries that would explain this.

Now here is the kicker - I deleted the address book entry for the incorrect name display and guess what - now another name shows up for the email address in question.

So where is TB looking for matches for email address to display a name?

This is very strange as the new match has never to my knowledge ever even been in the same email for any reason.

Thanks,

Chet

So where is TB looking for matches for email address to display a name?

Thunderbird gets all suggestions from your address books. Sounds like you have it saved somewhere without all the info.

Start a new message. Start typing the name or address that it is finding. When it suggests the contact select it and then save the email to drafts. Go to the Drafts folder and right click the message. Select Open in a New Window. Click the contact and select Edit Contact. From there you can fix the problem or delete the contact.

Ok, followed your instructions step by step...

In the edit window for the for the person that comes up incorrectly matched, there was no problem. This particular address entry has exactly 4 items - first name, last name, email address, and a jpg (link to google+).

This seems a bit off the mark as when I deleted the first incorrectly matched contact, this one took its place. When I have some time on this computer again (tomorrow), I will delete this new mis-match and see what happens and let you know.

Thanks for your help.

Chet

Just go to Tools menu (alt+T) > options > advanced > Reading and display and turn off the option to use your address book to generate display names.

Yes that works to display only the email address and I did try that to make sure it displayed the correct email address and it does. However, that does not fix an obvious problem.

So the questions still outstanding are, why only on one of the Win7 machines, what mechanism in TB finds the wrong name, and why don't either of the Mac systems demonstrate this problem.

I will gladly provide any information that you or anyone may need to see how this problem manifests.

Chet

Your left with two possible options. Your address book file is corrupt or the address is in the books multiple times.

I recently had significant address book corruption caused by a google address sync add-on. So perhaps you need to look to the files and see how large they are. less that 10 Kb without images is sort of normal as they are only formatted text files (images blow all of that out of the water.

Help menu > troubleshooting information and click on the show folder button and check the mab files there. abook is the personal address book and history is the collected addresses. After that they are not so obvious.