I figured out how to set a default email address for a contact in Apple Contacts, where the contact has multiple email addresses associated with them.
The Problem
Apple support claims that Siri is capable of learning which email address to use when someone you are contacting has multiple email addresses associated with them in your contact book. In my experience this is hit and miss. The result is that you need to check, each time, to ensure that an email is being sent to the correct email address.
The Solution
For the contact in question you must ensure that the email you want to most regularly contact them is the first email in the list of emails. Thus, if you had a set of emails ordered as such:
- example1@email.me
- example2@email.me
- example3@email.me
and wanted ‘example 3@email.me’ to be the default email that you send message to, you would:
- Open Contacts and the individual’s card, and then click ‘Edit’
- Copy the email that you want to remove as the current default (e.g., example1@email.me)
- Create a new email record by clicking the field beside ‘Other’ at the bottom of the list and paste the email address you copied at 2
- In the top email field (i.e., example1@email.me) replace it with the preferred default email (e.g. example3@email.me)
- Delete the now-duplicated example3@email.me
- Click ‘done’
At the conclusion of this reordering, your email order list would appear as:
- example3@email.me
- example2@email.me
- example1@email.me
The result of the reordering is that you should, by default, now send email to the contact’s example3@email.me. I hope this helps anyone else who’s running into this problem!
Excited Pixels 