Emails addressed to me under different/aliased names unrecognised

Question

Hi,
I have a family email account for me & my wife. We use one email address, but people sending email to us give us different names: ie
Jack Citizen <email@address>
Jill Citizen <email@address>
Jack & Jill <email@address>
Jack & Jill Citizen <email@address>
Jonathon Citizen <email@address>
and so on. Both our names are easily abbreviated in several ways. When I use "smart addresses" only one of these is recognised.
We have just one contact for us in the address book, which is given the name "Jack & Jill Citizen".
I realise that I can't control what people wish to call me, but I would like AddressBook to be able to say aha, all emails to <email@address> should be attached to "Jack & Jill Citizen".
I guess this is analogous to having email aliases.
Thanks for any suggestions you could give me.
Jack (& Jill, or whatever you feel like calling me. Feel free. Everyone else does.)
iMac Dual 2 Core Mac OS X (10.4.9)
iMac Dual 2 Core   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

Answer 1

Hi Jack (& Jill)
Mail looks in the Address Book for a name only if no
name was specified by the sender. If the sender
specifies a name in addition to the email address
when sending the message, that name takes precedence
over whatever information you have in your Address
Book when displaying that particular message.
Yes, I understand this last paragraph: but the implication is that "Smart Addresses" functionality becomes frequently redundant. For "Smart Addresses" to function correctly, both the email and the Full Name need to match the contents of the address book. If there is a full match of both of these, Smart Addresses displays only the name, not the email, and this is the behaviour I want. {That is the sole purpose of Smart Addresses.} But if there is not an exact match of Full Name as well as email, Smart Addresses continues to display both the Full Name and the email. Furthermore, the contextual menu attached to the contact has the option "add to address book" rather than "open in address book".
What I have been finding is that when mail is constantly suggesting to me that I add addresses to the address book for contacts I already have. When I click on the recipient (me), it does not have the option "open in address book" but rather "add to address book". Smart Addresses successfully matches only a fraction of the contacts, when in fact all of them are already in the address book.
If someone sends me an email, I need to know whether I have them already in my address book, so I can add them if need be. Smart Addresses is designed to help me do this, by displaying the Name only, not the address, if it recognises the person. But in practice, Smart Addresses tells me that almost every sender is unknown; that's because I have entered their names as John instead of Jonathon etc etc.
The only partial solutions I have are to add senders will-nilly to the address book, and then use the AddressBook menu item "look for Duplicate Entries" or "Merge Selected Cards". But this is a terrible solution which frequently destroys contact integrity.
I also notice that when (in Mail) I add addresses to the address book, the generated contact is unusual; first and last names and "&" signs are confused for middle names and so on. This reinforces the need to minimise adding to the address book via the Mail program, based on Smart Addresses.
Am I making sense?
Jack.