Can I make Gmail a little more formal?

July 10, 2011 2:18 PM

Can I force Gmail to show last names of message senders when I'm looking at the list of messages?

Back in 2009, we had a question about changing a message sender's display name in gmail. There was no good answer then, so I might be out of luck, but I'm asking for something slightly different.

When I get an email from Antoine Batiste it shows up as from "Antoine Batiste." But when I reply and then he replies it shows up as "me, Antoine (3)." I'd like it to be "me, Antoine Batiste (3)." Is this possible?

posted by Xalf to technology (4 answers total)

It doesn't seem like there's a provision for it in the browser interface for Gmail. You can connect your account to a mail client such as Thunderbird or Outlook and then disable message threading to ensure you get the full name, but I don't think that's what you're after here.
posted by Horselover Phattie at 2:31 PM on July 10, 2011

Obviously this doesn't scale well, but you could create a Gmail label "Antoine Batiste" and filter all messages from him into that label...
With a handful of names, it works great. With dozens or hundreds, feel free to tell me it's a horrible idea :)
posted by jozxyqk at 3:50 PM on July 10, 2011

jozxyqk - that was actually the best answer in the earlier thread. And it made me think of the following similar hack:

The real problem I'm trying to solve (I should have said this to begin with) is that I get frequent emails from someone I'll call Antoine Batiste, so whenever I get an email from a different Antoine, it is very confusing. I can prevent that by creating a filter for messages that have Antoine in the from field but not Batiste, and label those messages as NOT AB.
posted by Xalf at 6:09 PM on July 10, 2011

I don't know which browser you are using, but if you are using Firefox you can install the Greasemonkey addon and get the DisplayName gmail userscript which pulls names from your address book and shows them in your message list.
posted by bjrn at 1:42 AM on July 11, 2011 [1 favorite]