I am new on emclient, three months, and I find myself making far more frequent (and embarrassing) addressee entry errors than I ever did with Outlook client.
Example: I intend to email “Harry”, and I enter “H” in the addressee line, and Harry’s address is at the top of the suggested list of potential addressees. So I hit enter and focus on keying in the message body, feeling confident that Harry’s email was entered as the addressee. Sometimes, but not 100%, I do verify that the actual addressee is the intended one, but I never had reason to do that in all my years on MSFT Outlook client, so a hard habit to learn.
I later notice that the email went to Alice, third on the drop down list, with a name not beginning with the H I keyed in before hitting enter. I now see that the cause was that my cursor was stationary and accidentally over another email address, Alice’s, in the drop down list. I am not used to being careful where my cursor is sitting when the mouse is not in use.
I will never achieve 100% on verifying the address, so I am now uneasy in using emclient in this respect, due to the high level of potential embarrassment with the wrong addressee.
Is there any way to modify emclient settings to avoid this to me new problem in creating emails? This issue to me is a major one, due to potential levels of embarrassment,etc. What about requiring an actual mouse click in emclient, instead of just hovering. Is that a setting?
The autosuggested contact is not selected until you move the mouse. So if you use keyborad only, this should never happen. And by the way Outlook behaves exactly the same way.
I am putting here a summary of an emailed reply. There is one very important relevant difference between emclient and Outlook (…2021…), as follows.
In emclient, when you enter the first letter in the address field, the immediate drop down list potentially slides under any pointer already in a sizable part of the email’s blank message area, and whatever email address in the drop down list that happens to be under the pointer at that point will be selected automatically. Hitting return will put that address in the address field of the email being created, an address well down in the suggested recipients list.
However in Outlook 20XX, a pointer already in in the blank message area is not activated by entering the first letter of the addressee and the resulting drop down list, but instead the first top item in the drop down list is automatically selected, unless and until a different address is selected by the user, by clicking.
You could say that the suggested recipient drop down list can slide under a pointer already in the message area and cause an unintended (even if visible) selection and recipient address entry, whereas in Outlook the drop down list slides over the pointer, rendering it for the moment functionless without user clicking.
This fact about the differences between these two apps, which is easily confirmed, in my view fully explains my sharp increase in addressee errors in my moving from two decades on Outlook to emclient several months ago. With emclient, positioning a mouse arrow in the empty message field as just a place to put it for a moment, can lead to an easily unnoticed addressee error, unless the user is very careful and diligent. That high diligence requirement is in my view not ideal for email software.
I intend to email “Harry”, and I enter “H” in the addressee line, and Harry’s address is at the top of the suggested list of potential addressees. So I hit enter and focus on keying in the message body, feeling confident that Harry’s email was entered as the addressee.
I personally allways use the arrow down key and then press enter or click the mouse on the recipient "after typing the first or second letter of the recipient, to make sure I get the correct recipient. Otherwise it might be the wrong one.
The recipient To: line history can also change over time so that person starting with eg: H may then not then be at the top of the list anymore.