Change your name in Mac Mail (displayed from emails you send)

When you add an email account in Mac Mail, your name, or "display name" as it will appear to your email recipients, is part of the information you supply, which will be saved under your email account profile alongside email address, password, etc. But this is something you can easily change after the fact, as this tutorial explains.

Change display name for an email account in Apple Mail

• When you are inside Apple Mail, click on Preferences under the Mail menu.
• Then, select the Accounts tab: in the left pane, you will see a listing of all the email accounts currently setup on your Mac (MobileMe or other).
• If you got married, for example, and need to change your display name for multiple email accounts, just repeat the steps outlined below for each of them.
• Click on the email account you want to edit (it is automatically selected if you only have one email account in Mac Mail).
• The right side of this screen includes three tabs: make sure that the "Account Information" tab is selected (click on it otherwise).
• You will see a series of text fields, Mac Mail uses to authenticate you when sending and/or receiving emails, and uses the text typed inside the "Full Name" field as display name that your email recipients will see alongside your email address.
• Triple-click inside the Full Name field to select its content, and change your name by typing over the current value.
• When you are done, hit the Esc key to close the Preferences, and click Save to accept your name change.
• From this point on, your changed name will be used when you send email messages from Mac Mail. If you are using Mail on multiple Macs, make sure to update your display name inside these copies of Mail as well.

Tip: it might be a good idea to let others know about your new display name in Mac Mail, since your email recipients may be expecting emails from a certain name, or create email rules to handle emails coming from your old display name, etc. Since most people will work with your email address when creating mail filters, this should normally not matter. But a typical case where changing name for your email account can create confusion is when your recipients try to sort their email messages by From field, or "Sent by" - if your new name doesn't start in the same alphabetical order as your previous display name, your emails to that person will appear in two separate groups in an email program sorted by Sender's Name!