When entering a new contact into my Outlook Express address book, I select the option with last name followed by the first name separated by a comma (e.g., Smith, John). All displays of the list are selected to sort by last name. When entering an addressee in the ‘To:’ field of a new email message Outlook Express automatically fills in the correct e-mail address of the recipient. However, when I press the ‘Send’ button I am often presented with a dialogue box listing all the addressees with the same first name (i.e., ‘John’ in the above example). Any ideas? The computer is running Windows 98 SE with Outlook Express.

I managed to replicate your situation on my version of Outlook Express. Seemingly, the reason this problem occurs is because Outlook Express is treating the comma (between the surname and first name) as a separator used when sending the email to two (or more) recipients. For example, Outlook Express thinks that you are attempting to send the email to somebody named ‘Smith’ and somebody named ‘John’. Outlook Express does not prompt you with a list of addressees for the surname as presumably, no-one in your address book has the same surname as another person. If they did, you would also be presented with the ‘Check Names’ window with all the people with the same surname. As first names are more common than surnames, you obviously have more than one person with the same first name in your address book, therefore you are being presented with the window asking to which of those people you wish to send the email (e.g., to which ‘John’ do you want to send your email). This problem does not occur if you set the names in the address book to be displayed with no comma in between the surname and first name (e.g., ‘John Smith’ or, if you want to maintain having the surname before the first name, ‘Smith John’). Of course, if you have two contacts in your address book with the exact same name (which is more common that you think, especially if people have more than one email address) then the ‘Check Names’ window will appear asking you to select to which address you wish to send the message (but there is no way around this). If you want to maintain the comma separator between the surname and first name then I am unsure what can be done. There is a registry hack to switch off ‘Check Names’ but this did not work when I tried it on my computer. However, you may have more luck. Before starting, remember to be careful when editing the registry as changing settings in the registry can be hazardous to your computer’s health! Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘regedit’. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USERIdentities{1234…ABCD’¦}SoftwareMicrosoftOutlook Express5.0Mail. In the right-hand pane you will see a value named ‘Accounts Checked’. Double-click this setting, note down the current value (if this procedure does not fix the problem, you should change the setting back to its original value) and set the ‘Value data:’ to 0. Click OK. Close the Registry Editor. Restart Windows. Check if the problem persists. If it does, consider whether much is being lost by removing the comma separator between surname and first name and using a blank space (e.g., Smith John) instead. This looks just as tidy and will allow the names to be sorted by surname then first name, which you want.