Does Postal Mailing Export really need Name field?

[LoganBear]

When attempting to match two people for the Postal Mailing Export, we're experiencing a problem.  We have people who share the same address, except the address of one person includes their name.  This isn't considered a match and so they are not combined.  I'm not sure what other purpose the 'Name' field is used for, since it doesn't show up when editing or adding an address.  So can we not use the 'Name' field as part of the comparison for the Postal Mailing Export?

[Dave Greenberg]

Wondering if you're referring to the 'Address Name' property, which is an optional field for addresses? It can be exposed to view / editing via Administer > Localization > Address Settings. It's used for things like "Summer Home", "College Dorm" etc.

[LoganBear]

Yes, that's the field. When certain addresses weren't matching for a Postal Mailing, I checked the table, and noticed that the Address Name field sometimes contained the name of the contact.  I think this comes from certain credit card transactions, but I haven't investigated enough to know which ones.  Most of the time it comes from offline transactions, but once or twice, when the billing address is different from the home address (even if it's just the person's name).  Because of this, the address matching fails.  So, I'm not sure if the address name should be used in matching for Postal Mailing. 

[joanne]

Although this does not add directly to the debate on what to include in matching for Postal Mailing, I can confirm that for the Eway payment processor the billing Address Name is filled sometimes but not always. 

From what I can tell after 5 minutes checking it seems that payments for events always include the person's name in the billing Address Name field even if the billing name is no different from the person's name.

Other contributions don't fill the billing Address Name field.

[Dave Greenberg]

I can't think of a good argument for including Address Name in the postal mailing export match logic. Please file an issue on the issue tracker for 4.6. If you can also post a PR or patch that changes the behavior, that will help ensure it gets into the next release.