I recently received this message from a visitor to my website. He was experiencing an odd problem with email on his iPad.

Message:
Hi there. I have a problem in that when receiving email the display
name (my name) is not my display name but a string of text – “I would
prefer you.” I don’t know how this has happened. If I set the account
up on another ipad it is just normal… I can’t find a setting on my pad
and have already deleted the account and set it up again.

It looks like this (see below) The mails do not look like this in my outlook or online outlook accounts only on my iPad and only incoming emails.

From: John Smith
To: email 2) I would prefer you to use

With a quick exchange of emails and a bit of sleuthing, I was able to solve the problem. For some reason the “name” associated with his email account was somehow changed to that odd string of text. So I asked him to check his account name in Settings.

Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Accounts > select Account
Check the name under account information

Sure enough, that odd string of text was there in place of his name, and showed up in every email message he received in the “to” field. Deleting the odd text and entering his name fixed the problem.