wrong name associated with my email address

Question

wrong name associated with my email address

Herbie Grewal 0

My http://Outlook.com/Hotmail email address is incorrectly associated with the name “Catherine Mcbride” in Microsoft’s recipient/person lookup.

My Microsoft account profile and Outlook account both correctly show my own name. “Catherine Mcbride” is not in my Outlook Contacts.

When I compose an email and type my own Hotmail address in the To field, Outlook suggests “Catherine Mcbride” with my email address. The same incorrect association occurs in Outlook for iPhone, Outlook for Mac, and Outlook on the web at http://Outlook.com.

I have already:

Reset the Outlook account on iPhone.

Checked Outlook Contacts — no Catherine Mcbride contact exists.

Checked my Microsoft account profile — my correct name is shown.

Checked recent account sign-in activity — no unknown activity was shown.

Downloaded and searched Expanded People Suggestions — Catherine Mcbride is not present.

Checked Imported Device Contacts — empty.

Turned off and cleared Expanded People Suggestions — the incorrect association still remains.

Tried removing/hiding the suggestion in Outlook for iPhone — it immediately returns.

http://Outlook.com search also treats some messages actually sent by me as matching “From: Catherine Mcbride,” even though those messages show my correct name as the sender.

This appears to be an incorrect server-side person/recipient identity association or search/index entry linking “Catherine Mcbride” to my Hotmail address. Please escalate this for investigation and correction rather than asking me to clear local Outlook contacts/cache again.

0 comments

2 answers

Your answer

Answer 1

For an Outlook.com/Hotmail account, when the wrong name is associated with the address across Outlook for iPhone, Outlook for Mac, and Outlook on the web, and local contacts, profile name, imported contacts, and expanded people suggestions have already been checked and cleared, the supported next step is to submit the issue from Outlook.com so it is assigned to an Engineer for investigation.

Steps:

Sign in to the Outlook.com account.
In the upper-right corner, select ? and then Feedback.
Select Give Feedback.
Describe the problem.
Select Next.
Select Skip and send message.

That submission path is the documented way to have an Engineer research account-level Outlook.com data issues and contact the account owner.

Fix problems importing contacts to Outlook

Answer 2

@Herbie Grewal said

no Catherine Mcbride contact exists

1 -- Try adding a Contact to your account with the correct Display Name. Sometimes this helps.

Turned off and cleared Expanded People Suggestions — the incorrect association still remains

That puts you in a whole different category than most people who have this problem.

2 -- Did you follow directions like these?

See the Answer by "Hornblower409 May 1 2026" - "How to convert your Autocomplete List to Contacts and erase the List" at
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5871874/manually-removing-an-email-address-from-the-sugges?orderby=newest&page=1#answers

3 -- Did you wait 48 hours after clearing the Suggest People cache?

Please escalate this for investigation and correction rather than asking me to clear local Outlook contacts/cache again.

No one from Microsoft Support monitors this forum. You have to initiate the support session.

Logon to https://outlook.live.com/
From the main menu: Help -> ? Help
{This should open the Help side panel}
Search Help -> {Your problem} and press Enter
Still need help? [Yes]
If you get "We're here to help": Tell us your problem -> {Your problem, again} [Get Help]
[Sign In] {Use any Outlook/Microsoft account}
Choose a support option -> Chat with a support agent in your web browser