225413 - Mail notification shows user name, not account name.

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

When an emai arrives and Mozilla pops up the new mail notification window, it
tells you that a user name has new mail in stead of saying that an account has
new email. This is confising, at least in some setups. In my case, I use an ISP
that gives out IMAP accounts that have random user names, but they're mapped to
real email addresses. And I've got several of those. So when I get new email to
any of those accounts, mozilla says that "m2039495 has x new messages", in stead
of simply telling me that "[e-mail] has x new messages". The
downside of this is of course that the account name is often longer than the
user name, but in my case, anything but the whole account makes very little sense.

Comment 1

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

Attachment: Include the whole account name in email notifications.

Comment 2

[Scott MacGregor]

the reason we don't do this today is because including the entire account name
in the notification makes the alert notifcation too wide. It took up too much
space on a user's screen unless the user was running at a high resolution. 

That's the reason why we don't use the whole account name currently. We can
revisit this issue but I thought I'd explain why we may still say no to this
patch :).

Comment 3

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

Understood. What alternatives do we have, do we want to make this smarter some
way, or revert to a yet-one-more-pref? Or does this annoy the &*^% out of just
myself, and myself alone? :-)

Comment 4

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

How about putting a limit on the max number of characters we include from the
account name, like 16, and follow up with ... if it doesn't fit in 16
characters? Then I'd get "jst@mozilla.j... has x new messages", which would
solve my problem, whereas what I get now doesn't.

Comment 5

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

Attachment: Split the text in the popup onto two different lines.

This takes another approach (discussed with mscott offline) to solving this
problem, this splits up the text in the notification window into two lines, the
account on the first line, and the text "has x new messages" on the second.
Thoughts?

Comment 6

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Note that this bug is a dupe of bug 133960.  I won't mark it as such since 
there's a patch in place.  However, there was a little flurry of activity there 
recently, regarding use of the "realuserName" vs. "userName" preference.  
Perhaps that should be examined before this patch development goes much further.

The value that *I* would like to see displayed is the name of the account, as it 
appears in the folder pane.  In my case, that is a very short string indeed for 
all of my accounts.

Comment 7

[Scott MacGregor]

Johnny, I was thinking about this a bit more this yesterday and had a 3rd idea I
wanted to suggest.

What if we just replaced the alert Title string with the name of the account.
Then we only have a single body line like we currently do which says "n new
messages".

Attaching a screen shot which shows:

1) the current alert 
2) the alert where we use the account name and use two lines (jst's patch)
3) a mock up of an alert whose title is the account name followed by the number
of new messages. Still need to tweak the padding / spacing in this mockup a bit.

Thoughts? 

Comment 8

[Scott MacGregor]

Attachment: screen shot summarizing the current options

Comment 9

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

If you end up using the account-name for the popup-alert, it would be good to 
use the same string in the tooltip that displays on the tray-icon.

Comment 10

[Scott MacGregor]

Attachment: here is the patch I used for option #3 (the 3rd image in the screen shot)

Comment 11

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

What if multiple accounts get new mail during the same biff?

Comment 12

[Scott MacGregor]

jst and I talked it over and we both like option 3.

Comment 13

[Scott MacGregor]

Comment on attachment 135503 [details] [diff] [review]
here is the patch I used for option #3 (the 3rd image in the screen shot)

my spacing looks off in a couple of places. I'll fix that before I check in.

Comment 14

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

Comment on attachment 135503 [details] [diff] [review]
here is the patch I used for option #3 (the 3rd image in the screen shot)

Looks good to me, though you changed messenger.properties too
(biffNotification_message(s)), right?

With that, r=jst

Comment 15

[Scott MacGregor]

checked in. Thanks a lot for the help jst. 

Comment 16

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** Bug 133960 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 17

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Does this also fix bug 182687 ?

Comment 18

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Comment on attachment 135383 [details] [diff] [review]
Split the text in the popup onto two different lines.

removing obsolete review request

Comment 19

[timeless]

*** Bug 182687 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***