TO field no longer parses names correctly

[bucky3]

I have some email distribution lists that I keep in plain text in this
format:

Smith, John; Cooper, Katy;

I've always been able to copy and paste the plain text into the TO
field, clicked on Check Names, and they would all be underlined,
meaning that Exchange had looked them all up and verified them in the
corporate address book.

But now when I do that, it gives me an error message "Outlook found
more than one Smith". If I click "Cancel", the TO field will convert
all the commas into semicolons and really be messed up.

Anyone know why this happened? Thanks.

 

[bucky3]

But now when I do that, it gives me an error message "Outlook found
more than one Smith". If I click "Cancel", the TO field will convert
all the commas into semicolons and really be messed up.

Hmm, after some playing around, I discovered that if I removed the
commas, it could look them up for most cases, except for people whose
last names consisted of 2 words. So this now works:

Smith John; Cooper Katy;

but this would not work (last name is 2 words separated by space):
Jones Miller Michelle

I'm pretty sure it's something with my outlook configuration (rather
than Exchange server) because my coworker was able to use commas just
fine. I'm using OL2003.

 

[bucky3]

But now when I do that, it gives me an error message "Outlook found
more than one Smith". If I click "Cancel", the TO field will convert
all the commas into semicolons and really be messed up.
Anyone know why this happened? Thanks.

Finally figured out the problem. Somehow this option got checked:
"Allow comma as address separator" (probably as a result of installing
some outlook patches). That's what was messing up auto-resolution. Now
I unchecked it and it works just as before.