Outlook change SENDER question

You know, I know there are all kinds of forums for questions like these, but no one is as good as a Doper, and I hate to register at yet another place unless I plan to be there a lot…

Yes, I’ve Googled and Google-Grouped, but everyone’s question refers to themselves as a sender. Here’s MY question:

In Outlook (2002 in my case) is there a way to change the SENDER name/address in items that I’ve RECEIVED?

Note: I don’t want to change my account and send email from one account or another.

I do want to change who the email’s from. The reason is a lot of vendors (for some reason) insist on using RoadRunner or Hotmail or other accounts, and sometimes multiples, and it’s always a pain in the butt to look for them under 2, 4, or 10 different email accounts. As you know, group-by-sender in Outlook uses whatever name is in the senders mail record, and failing that, the email address. It’s frustrating.

Just changing the information when double-clicking the sender doesn’t help – even if saving. It just reverts to what was there. I tried investigating a VB solution, but I don’t know how to excute VB functions from within Outlook…

Anyone? Vielen Dank.

Off the top of my head, to execute VB functions in outlook you will write a macro. Can’t you open the editor for these by CTRL + F10 or 11? Anyway, that should set you off on the right track.

As I started looking into it more and more, the dang sender name field is listed as read-only! POS Outlook…

How are the emails stored on your hard drive?

If they’re plaintext files that Outlook stores somewhere, you can simply use a program to do a find-and-replace on all your email messages and have them change all the email addresses to one common one.

If Outlook doesn’t store them as plaintext by default, perhaps you can export all of your emails to text, change the senders, and then re-import them into Outlook?

Yeah, if Microsoft believed in Unix mailboxes, there’d be no problem, but it’s some proprietary database format. The export/reimport scheme has promise. Thanks for the idea.