[Bug 956618] Re: Nickname not over-riding names in email address

Bug Watch Updater 956618 at bugs.launchpad.net
Fri May 25 00:17:56 UTC 2012


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On 2006-02-01T15:46:50+00:00 Brian-atkins wrote:

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Thunderbird 1.5

I have an address book entry with the nickname "wil".  When I type "wil"
in the To line in the composition window, the result is an entry who's
last name is "Wilbur" and which has no nickname at all.

The algorithm for finding addresses in the phone book should have the
highest precedence on a full string match of nickname (after all, why
did the user take the time to enter a nick name after all").  Imho, the
precedence should be:

1) Full string match on nickname
2) Full string match on last name
3) Full string match on first name
4) Initial string match on nickname
5) Initial string match on last name
6) Initial string match on first name

You may not think this is important, but anything that causes mail to
get sent to the wrong user inadvertantly is just about he worst possible
problem a mailer can have.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create an entry with "wil" as the nickname
2. Create an entry with Wilber as the last name
3. Enter "wil" in the To: field of the composition window

Actual Results:  
The entry with the last name Wilbur is autocompleted

Expected Results:  
The entry with the nickname "wil" should have been autocompleted

I entered this defect before, and have seen others report it.  However,
I searched Bugzilla and, searching for "nickname", did not find it.  I
apologize if this is duplicate, but after about 30min searching, I
couldn't find the old bug.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/0

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On 2006-02-01T17:28:54+00:00 Brian-atkins wrote:

I should have added a possibly important point.  I have multiple address
books, which appear, and I assume are searched in alphabetical order.
The entry for "Wilber" appears in an address book at the top, which
begins with "A".  The entry with "wil" as the nickname appears in an
address book further down, which begins with "I".

Perhaps the solution is to allow the user to set the order by which the
address books are searched?

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/1

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On 2006-02-01T20:10:31+00:00 Mcow wrote:

See bug 323364, which references several other bugs about list ordering.

I'm not convinced this is a major bug; it sounds like an enhancement request 
to me.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/2

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On 2006-02-14T01:04:30+00:00 Eg-pat-tx wrote:

(In reply to comment #0)
> User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8)
> Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
> Build Identifier: Thunderbird 1.5

This anomoly appeared after I updated to v1.5 Before typing "Jim"
followed by the ENTER key produced the ONE email with nickname "Jim".
Now my mail is getting  addressed to an email address beginning with
"Jim..."  Why on earth would anyone updating the app change this
behavior. I can't use nicknames at all now because they DON"T WORK!

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/3

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On 2006-08-31T21:17:18+00:00 Stachnis wrote:

> This anomoly appeared after I updated to v1.5 Before typing "Jim" followed by
> the ENTER key produced the ONE email with nickname "Jim". Now my mail is
> getting  addressed to an email address beginning with "Jim..."  Why on earth
> would anyone updating the app change this behavior. I can't use nicknames at
> all now because they DON"T WORK!

I totally agree. I send several email sto the wrong person in the last days.
I changed back to Mozilla Suite, which does not has not this in my opinion  
really serious bug.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/4

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On 2006-09-25T10:31:34+00:00 Alexandre-ferrieux wrote:

Total agreement, this is a serious *regression* from ol'good Mozilla 1.7.
And also from any decent mail client by the way: only an idiot would prefer to have all substring matches from LDAP or collected address book take precedence over the hand-crafted, ultra-short nicknames.

So currently for me Thunderbird is unusable, because of theis very
nickname issue.

Since this bug was reported 8 months ago, and judged "just a feature
request" by the experts, I'm going to drop Thunderbird, and avise many
others to think twice before leaving mozilla.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/5

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On 2008-06-17T22:36:36+00:00 James Teh wrote:

Regardless of whether this is an enhancement request or a bug, I think
it is an important issue. If I assign a nickname to an entry in the
address book, this means i want to refer to that user by that nickname.
Other matches should still show in the autocomplete list, but I do think
that the entry with matching nickname should take precedence.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/6

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On 2008-06-18T07:47:08+00:00 Mbanner wrote:

The current TB trunk (3.x) builds, and I believe TB 2.0 have been
changing to sort by how much you use particular addresses (essentially
"popularity"). IMHO this is far better than sorting by nickname, however
Bryan may have some thoughts on this.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/7

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On 2008-07-03T14:37:40+00:00 Mcow wrote:

Somewhere I described this example of why nickname should trump
popularity:

My mother is named Mary.  I have a friend named Mary.  Mom's AB entry
has a nickname "Mom" -- and I write her far more often than I do my
friend.  My friend's AB entry has a nickname "Mary".  But if I open a
compose window and type Mary, it's my Mom who gets the first match
because she's "more popular."

That's just wrong.  Nicknames should take highest priority.

xref bug 331817

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/8

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On 2008-10-10T00:26:42+00:00 Eg-pat-tx wrote:

Currently "nickname" in the address book does not work. I am really
annoyed that this bug was never considered serious enough for someone to
fix. Until it is, someone should ELIMINATE the nickname option.  It is
dangerous for people typing a "nickname" in the address "To" assuming it
will actually work.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/9

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On 2008-10-10T08:58:07+00:00 Eagle-lu wrote:

Created attachment 342561
patch

set PopularIndex based on the different matching case.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/10

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On 2008-11-05T15:10:44+00:00 Mbanner wrote:

Comment on attachment 342561
patch

Sorry, this just isn't the right fix.

One of the problems is it ignores the popularity index (i.e. overwrites
it).

I think what we really need here for this bug, is to consider our
current algorithms and how we can improve them. I'm hoping Bryan (our
User Experience guy) can set up a discussion on that.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/11

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On 2008-11-05T19:17:59+00:00 Bryan Clark wrote:

This sort order is not going to work effectively across all the
different ways that people are searching for others.  One type of use
requires the nickname is more important and the other type requires
first or family names.

The real goal here is that when a user types 'wil' into the auto-
complete for the first time we show all the possible matches on
different (and relevant) fields for that term.  When the user selects
the desired person from the auto-complete list Thunderbird associates
the term 'wil' with that person.

This idea is called 'frecency', by the Firefox team, which was built
into the FF3 awesomebar auto-completion.  It gives the user a sense of
the application learning their habits and allows them to find the same
person by the same string over and over again.

We need to have a similar algorithm to this built against our contact
database.  I believe Gloda already has an idea of 'frecency' built into
it, however we need to keep tweaking the data points it uses.

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/The_Places_frecency_algorithm

We should probably open a new bug for a frecency index and I recommend
against this path.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/12

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On 2008-11-05T23:25:49+00:00 James Teh wrote:

(In reply to comment #12)
> This sort order is not going to work effectively across all the different ways
> that people are searching for others.  One type of use requires the nickname is
> more important and the other type requires first or family names.
I don't understand when first or family names should ever be higher precedence than nickname. As I understand it, nickname should override Thunderbird's "frecency"; it essentially indicates that a user wants to always associate a specific word with a contact and that this word should always be used to gain quick access to this contact.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/13

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On 2008-11-06T11:04:55+00:00 Eagle-lu wrote:

(In reply to comment #11)
> (From update of attachment 342561 [details])
> Sorry, this just isn't the right fix.
> 
> One of the problems is it ignores the popularity index (i.e. overwrites it).
> 
searching "PopularityIndex" in mxr.mozilla.org, I can't find anywhere else that use it expect here. What's the meaning of " PopularityIndex"?  Isn't it how "popular" the AB item is?

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/14

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On 2008-11-06T11:16:49+00:00 Mbanner wrote:

(In reply to comment #14)
> (In reply to comment #11)
> > (From update of attachment 342561 [details] [details])
> > Sorry, this just isn't the right fix.
> > 
> > One of the problems is it ignores the popularity index (i.e. overwrites it).
> > 
> searching "PopularityIndex" in mxr.mozilla.org, I can't find anywhere else that
> use it expect here. What's the meaning of " PopularityIndex"?  Isn't it how
> "popular" the AB item is?

Its values are set up in nsMsgCompose.cpp it is designed to be
incremented each time the user sends a message to a contact. There are
problems with it (for instance it just increments, there's no frequency
option in there) which are covered in different bugs. The only actual
use currently is in the autocomplete code.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/15

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On 2008-11-22T22:39:20+00:00 Finishlynx wrote:

Just something to try to drag this back to fundamentals here.

As a Luddite who just the other day "upgraded" from Netscape Mail 7.2 to
Thunderbird, this bug is the first thing I noticed (yes, it is a bug, in
the category of "something that used to work and is now broken").  To be
fair, I was happy to discover just how similar Thunderbird was to my old
favorite clunker 7.2.  But this bug drives me crazy.  It is *way* too
easy to improperly address email by mistake.  No, I don't want the
software "thinking" for me about who "pete" is based on popularity or
the alphabet or anything else.  I know who "pete" is, I have told the
software who "pete" is, and that is what matters.

I would say that the only reason that there hasn't been more noise about
this is because it is not obvious to the average user (like me) just how
one goes about complaining about something like this.  It took me a long
time to find this forum.  But here are some others I found along the way
that show we-who-would-like-this-fixed are not outliers.

http://fixunix.com/mozilla/435688-nickname-priority.html
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=371872

Thanks for listening.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/16

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On 2008-11-24T21:55:07+00:00 Eg-pat-tx wrote:

Keep on shouting until someone fixes this bug.  It's bad design to offer
nicknames, then place them bottom priority in the UI. I sent mail to the
wrong person without noticing the bug when I switched to Tbird. Nearly
went back to my previous mailreader and can't believe it's still
unresolved!

You couldn't have said it better:  "... this bug drives me crazy.  It is
*way* too easy to improperly address email by mistake.  No, I don't want
the software "thinking" for me about who "pete" is based on popularity
or the alphabet or anything else.  I know who "pete" is, I have told the
software who "pete" is, and that is what matters."

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/17

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On 2009-12-15T16:41:55+00:00 9e9o1ko8b2f5xpiibg-chris-0zxvj9hhx1hzo5xiyh wrote:

I just installed TB 3 and because the address popularity counts seem to
have been cleared out in the process, the lack of nickname precedence is
even more noticeable - I may just have to turn off autocomplete
altogether so I stop embarrassing myself with messages sent to the wrong
recipient. :)  It would be great to see a fix for this soon.  Bug 530865
seems to be related.  Thanks!

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/18

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On 2009-12-15T20:05:52+00:00 Bryan Clark wrote:

(In reply to comment #17)
> Keep on shouting until someone fixes this bug.

Please do not, this is not how effective communities can work.  I can
understand wanting changes to happen (I have bugs in Firefox that aren't
fixed) but working together as well behaved adults is what makes
progress.


If we had a patch that merely weighted the nickname matches above the popularity index then I think that would be an acceptable update to our current system.  I believe a frecency index would be a much better value to use however that's for another bug to tackle.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/19

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On 2009-12-15T20:07:03+00:00 Bryan Clark wrote:

@Chris, thanks I hadn't seen the seamonkey version, bug 530865

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/20

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On 2009-12-28T19:12:57+00:00 Themoz wrote:

An earlier commenter said they were a Luddite who only recently upgraded
to Thunderbird 3.  Count me among the same crowd.  I had been using a
shareware mail client from roughly 2002.

That client allowed me to address an e-mail by typing a comma-delimited
list of nicknames into any of the relevant fields (TO, CC, or BCC).
Thunderbird also supports parsing a comma-delimited list of email
addresses into multiple entries into its addressing user interface.

Expanding on the example above, assume you have nicknames "wil", "jan",
and "bob".  You should be able to type "wil,jan,bob" to quickly address
a mail to all three.  When focus leaves the field, the parser should
expand each based on a nickname match, resulting in three entries in the
addressing user interface.

The current behavior will break apart the comma-delimited list into
three entries, but the nicknames will be retained (that is, the user
interface will literally say "To: wil", "To: jan", and "To: bob").

It seems the current addressing design in Thunderbird is to attempt to
resolve the address you're typing before you leave the current text
field.  This explains the "(user input) >> (resolution proposal)" user
interface gimmick in the text input field.

I think that hitting tab when a proposed resolution is displayed--even
if only momentarily or perhaps as an event that fires prior to losing
focus--acts as a user selection of the proposed resolution.  The trouble
is that parsing of a comma-delimited list is apparently executed after
that resolution process.  The resolution process finds no match for
"wil,jan,bob" and therefore assumes that represents the totality of the
desired input and passes the value over to the comma-delimited parser.

I consider nicknames to be a special case of address resolution.  As the
proponents above have said, at the least nicknames should be treated as
the #1 priority in finding a matching address.  But I would recommend
going further: namely, nickname resolution should occur -after- the
comma-delimited parsing of the user's input occurs.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/21

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On 2010-01-09T00:53:31+00:00 Eg-pat-tx wrote:

To repeat Brian's perfect comment after months patiently waiting for a solution:
"You may not think this is important, but anything that causes mail to get sent
to the wrong user inadvertently is just about he worst possible problem a
mailer can have."

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/22

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On 2010-01-09T21:29:47+00:00 Y9a7s7tjd2jxyck-steve wrote:

How can this be classified as Enhancement.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=fields.html#importance
It is certainly a loss of function, so it's somewhere between Normal and Major. (and I say Major).
Other than soliciting votes (which I have done in Moz community support) how can one get the impotance correctly defined?

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/23

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On 2010-01-09T21:38:24+00:00 Y9a7s7tjd2jxyck-steve wrote:

(In reply to comment #12)
> This sort order is not going to work effectively across all the different ways
> that people are searching for others.  One type of use requires the nickname is
> more important and the other type requires first or family names.
>
What other use of nicknames is there other than addressing messages?  I don't follow the notion that one might want another field to have higher priority in this context.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/24

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On 2010-01-13T15:43:40+00:00 9e9o1ko8b2f5xpiibg-chris-0zxvj9hhx1hzo5xiyh wrote:

I've inquired about getting this bug reclassified as a loss of
functionality:

http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird/browse_thread/thread/11146031bdc47ecd#

Chris

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/25

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On 2010-01-13T16:12:10+00:00 Shopik wrote:

Who experience this regression in TB3 should have look into bug 497722.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/26

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On 2010-01-29T21:16:41+00:00 Bryan Clark wrote:

*** Bug 450279 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/27

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On 2010-02-18T12:36:35+00:00 Kam3bombh9k-140-wph05ilav2k wrote:

bug 497722 is not the same as this bug.  Further, I installed 3.01, and
bug 497722 is not fixed.  Entering a letter into the "to" field still
produces random results.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/28

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On 2010-02-18T12:39:57+00:00 Mbanner wrote:

(In reply to comment #28)
> bug 497722 is not the same as this bug.

Correct.

> Further, I installed 3.01, and bug
> 497722 is not fixed.

Yes it is not fixed in 3.0.1 as it was fixed after 3.0.1. It will be
fixed in 3.0.2 (not released yet).

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/29

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On 2010-02-18T12:46:36+00:00 Kam3bombh9k-140-wph05ilav2k wrote:

My brief testing indicates that trunk build 3.2a1pre has fixed this bug.
The "to" field now fills in like it did under Tbird 2.0.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/30

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On 2010-02-21T18:40:05+00:00 Vseerror wrote:

*** Bug 530865 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/31

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On 2011-02-22T01:39:24+00:00 Kzqdnsw4i20a5p-68p7m-x8oxkp4um1x7tv wrote:

This bug is still present as of 3.1.7 - ie. Use of a unique nicknames
doe not result in the associated email address appearing as the first
item in the list of suggested email addresses after the autocomplete
function runs. I suggest tha in the tab:

  Tools -> Options -> Composition -> Addressing:

an option of the form:

  [ ] Search Nickname field first?

..  be added, and of course the code updated to work that way.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/32

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On 2011-04-20T03:06:51+00:00 Peter-cherna wrote:

I agree this is a serious misbehavior and as far as I can tell (from the
end-user point of view, not from source), this is a regression.  In
Thunderbird 2, if I typed "Bob", and the auto-completion served up a
name I did not prefer, I could go into the address book, add "Bob" as
the nickname for my favorite Bob, and thereafter typing "Bob" would
*always* complete to the desired one.  When I moved to Thunderbird 3.1,
this was lost.  (Still true as of 3.1.7)

I don't know what other purpose nicknames even serve, if not to be used
for completion.

As far as I can tell from reading the various here-linked bugs on auto-
completion order, none of them address the apparent regression in
nickname handling.

(I think a future change to use frecency might work out, and one might
argue that a nickname should give weight in frecency much like
bookmarking a URI might, but given this is seems to be a regression, and
it's serious enough (misdirected email), I would hate to see the fix for
this entangled into a larger issue of frecency.)

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/thunderbird/+bug/956618/comments/33


** Changed in: thunderbird
       Status: Unknown => Confirmed

** Changed in: thunderbird
   Importance: Unknown => Wishlist

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  Nickname not over-riding names in email address

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