Bugzilla

This has outlived its feasibility, especially for the reported scenario of actually typing names in. Current TB behaviour prevents this in many ways. Also, 16 comments and only two age-old dupes in 12 years don't indicate much user interest.

- As comma can be a valid part of display name, `Joe, Erna, Jane <team@example.com>` is currently correctly parsed as a single valid address (making this bug impossible and invalid).
- Autocomplete search algorithm has changed long back and we now do partial matching in more fields on each of your search words, returning more results initially (which works much against this proposal here), but adding another search fragment will narrow down fast and flexible, Google style.
- Currently it also can't work at all as long as we still autocomplete on comma.
- When you type them in one by one, let's say we would not autocomplete on comma, why not just press Enter or Tab after each recipient and actually see what you get, instead of letting TB go into risky guesswork? (*Pasting a comma-separated list* in looks like an unlikely scenario and risky if the list wasn't from yourself, and if it was, well, you better have a list of all the email addresses or a mailing list or some other way.

Alas, this proposal can never work in a safe and predictable way, except for edge cases. Highly error-prone. No longer useful where we all have 100s of addresses in our ABs. Violating standards, too (see above).

We can't have a comma-separated list of words or partial addresses and then just autocomplete all of them with a random match.
For search words which are not email addresses, you'd have to be 100% sure that your searchword only matches a single entry, or the right entry first, but first matches and number of matches can change at any time - you can never be 100% sure that it works. Taking that risk of letting TB pick addresses for you for a whole list of people is just insane. Even autocompleting only when there's a single match would not help - how do I notice those addresses where I mistyped a single character and TB did *not* autocomplete?

For search words which look like email addresses - how to we figure that if you have foo@bar.ac.example.com in your address book (where subdomain ac could mean anything, e.g. access control), and you have a shorter foo@bar.ac in your comma-separated list, that you really want to autocomplete to the longer one and not keep the valid shorter address, foo@bar.ac (ac = Ascension Island), even though it's not in your AB?

Whichever way you look at this, it's a can of worms which we can never get safe and right and useful at the same time.

This has outlived its feasibility, especially for the reported scenario of actually typing names in. Current TB behaviour prevents this in many ways. Also, 16 comments and only two age-old dupes in 12 years don't indicate much user interest.

- As comma can be a valid part of display name, `Joe, Erna, Jane <team@example.com>` is currently correctly parsed as a single valid address (making this bug impossible and invalid).
- Autocomplete search algorithm has changed long back and we now do partial matching in more fields on each of your search words, returning more results initially (which works much against this proposal here), but adding another search fragment will narrow down fast and flexible, Google style.
- Currently it also can't work at all as long as we still autocomplete on comma.
- When you type them in one by one, let's say we would not autocomplete on comma, why not just press Enter or Tab after each recipient and actually see what you get, instead of letting TB go into risky guesswork? (*Pasting a comma-separated list* in looks like an unlikely scenario and risky if the list wasn't from yourself, and if it was, well, you better have a list of all the email addresses or a mailing list or some other way...)

Alas, this proposal can never work in a safe and predictable way, except for edge cases. Highly error-prone. No longer useful where we all have 100s of addresses in our ABs. Violating standards, too (see above).

We can't have a comma-separated list of words or partial addresses and then just autocomplete all of them with a random match.
For search words which are not email addresses, you'd have to be 100% sure that your searchword only matches a single entry, or the right entry first, but first matches and number of matches can change at any time - you can never be 100% sure that it works. Taking that risk of letting TB pick addresses for you for a whole list of people is just insane. Even autocompleting only when there's a single match would not help - how do I notice those addresses where I mistyped a single character and TB did *not* autocomplete?

For search words which look like email addresses - how to we figure that if you have foo@bar.ac.example.com in your address book (where subdomain ac could mean anything, e.g. access control), and you have a shorter foo@bar.ac in your comma-separated list, that you really want to autocomplete to the longer one and not keep the valid shorter address, foo@bar.ac (ac = Ascension Island), even though it's not in your AB?

Whichever way you look at this, it's a can of worms which we can never get safe and right and useful at the same time.