1132681 - Nicknames appear to have stopped having highest priority in recipient autocomplete when composing an email... (in scenarios of expanded result sets for very short single search word)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 325458

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Fred Stluka]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:35.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0
Build ID: 20150122214805

Steps to reproduce:

Typed a nickname in a recipient field when composing an email


Actual results:

Autocomplete shows addresses with the nickname as well as addresses with that same string as part of the address, and the nickname one is not the first match.


Expected results:

The nickname one should have been the first match as it used to be before I recently (past couple weeks at most) allowed Thunderbird to update itself to 31.4.0.

I'm running Thunderbird 31.4.0 on on Max OS X 10.6.8.

Thanks!
--Fred

Comment 1

[Daniel]

even worse in my setup: The adressbook seems to remember the nicknames and autocomplete also accepts them, but when I try to send the message, thunderbird claims that "Nickname" hasn't the right syntax for an email adress. (no wonder, as the nickname isn't replaced by it's adress...)

Comment 2

[Fred Stluka]

Daniel,

No, that's a separate bug.  For me at least, the autocomplete work, but is too slow.  I often hit Enter or Tab before it happens, so then, yes, the unexpanded nickname is an invalid address.

I just posted that is a separate ticket.  See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1132927

--Fred

Comment 3

[Daniel]

thanks for taking care! :)

Daniel

Comment 4

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

You're mistaken. nickname wasn't a criteria before either.

Comment 5

[Fred Stluka]

Magnus,

I've been using nicknames in Thunderbird for years now.  If I type 
a name like "tom" and it autocompletes with the wrong Tom, I create
a nickname like "toms" for the Tom I want, and in the future, I 
type "toms" and always get the right person.  That's been true for 
years.

Recently, my nicknames stopped being such high priority in the 
autosearch algorithm, so now typing "toms" autocompletes to a
list of people (perhaps the same list as before, I'm not sure),
but the person with that nickname is no longer at the top.

Something has definitely changed.  In the past month or so, I'm 
suddenly catching myself often as I'm about to send email to 
the wrong person.

--Fred

Comment 6

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Fred, thanks for your cooperative and friendly bug report.

I can confirm Magnus' statement that contrary to appearance, the autocomplete result sorting algorithm so far was never designed to ensure that full nickname matches end up at the top of the results list.

However, you are also right that it still *appeared* to work for many people like you IF the nickname was unique enough over any other searched fields on any other card, and, in case of multiple results, the old popularity-based algorithm would push your desired match to the top (not because of its nickname, but because of its higher popularity over other matches).

We've recently changed the result set to fix search failures that many users were rightly complaining about. In certain scenarios like yours, there'll now be more results than before, which might change your old order of results. Otoh, we also allow rapid reduction of result sets like this:

- John Doe
- John Big
- John Small
To get only John Doe, you can now type "jo do", if that's unique enough against your data.

Good news for you: We've just fixed Bug 325458 which is exactly your problem.
You'll still have to wait a little till it lands on release, latest on TB 38, planned release around 2015-05-12.

Fyi we also had some other bugs where certain combinations of clicking and pressing Enter could actually convert the recipient you had entered into another recipient (I think using keyboard-only avoids those). These have also been fixed and have been/will be rolled out asap.

In the meantime, you can use a truly unique nickname like "Toms#" (including the # sign or some such special character), which is likely to reduce your result set to exactly one match, so that should work for you like a true nick.

For more information, read my Bug 1133616 comment 1 (e.g. how to sort out "collected addresses" and remove unwanted remote-content contacts).

Comment 7

[Fred Stluka]

Thomas (and Magnus),

(In reply to Thomas D. from comment #6)
> Fred, thanks for your cooperative and friendly bug report.

No problem.  As a programmer for years, I understand the value of
good, detailed, friendly bug reports.  And as a user, I love the 
amount of free effort you guys are donating to making Thunderbird
a better product for me.  That's why I donate to the Mozilla
Foundation occasionally.  Anything more I can do to help?

> I can confirm Magnus' statement that contrary to appearance, the
> autocomplete result sorting algorithm so far was never designed to ensure
> that full nickname matches end up at the top of the results list.

OK.  Yeah, according to other comments I've now seen on various 
tickets, it just happened to often work that way.  Makes sense.

> However, you are also right that it still *appeared* to work for many people
> like you IF the nickname was unique enough over any other searched fields on
> any other card, and, in case of multiple results, the old popularity-based
> algorithm would push your desired match to the top (not because of its
> nickname, but because of its higher popularity over other matches).

I like the popularity-based algorithm.  Seems to have kicked in 
sometime in the past couple years.  Suddenly, I had less need for 
nicknames because it tended to learn which Tom I'd sent to most
often recently.  Nice!

All learned history seemed to get lost lately though, perhaps when 
the change was made to the search algorithm that affected my use of
nicknames.  It started moving people I hadn't talked to in years 
to the top.  May be learning again now though.  I think it's getting
better again.

> We've recently changed the result set to fix search failures that many users
> were rightly complaining about. In certain scenarios like yours, there'll
> now be more results than before, which might change your old order of
> results. Otoh, we also allow rapid reduction of result sets like this:
> 
> - John Doe
> - John Big
> - John Small
> To get only John Doe, you can now type "jo do", if that's unique enough
> against your data.

Cool!  I didn't know that.  I do the same in the autocomplete algorithm
for web apps for my clients.
 
> Good news for you: We've just fixed Bug 325458 which is exactly your problem.
> You'll still have to wait a little till it lands on release, latest on TB
> 38, planned release around 2015-05-12.

Excellent!!!

> Fyi we also had some other bugs where certain combinations of clicking and
> pressing Enter could actually convert the recipient you had entered into
> another recipient (I think using keyboard-only avoids those). These have
> also been fixed and have been/will be rolled out asap.

Nice!  I haven't seen those, but I'm pretty much a keyboard only guy:
- Cmd-N | toms | Tab | joe | Tab | Tab | Want to do lunch?... | Enter | body | Cmd-Enter

> In the meantime, you can use a truly unique nickname like "Toms#" (including
> the # sign or some such special character), which is likely to reduce your
> result set to exactly one match, so that should work for you like a true
> nick.

Excellent!  I'd started making the nicknames longer to be unique, but 
hadn't thought of using special chars.  "toms." works like a charm, 
and is easy to type.
 
> For more information, read my Bug 1133616 comment 1 (e.g. how to sort out
> "collected addresses" and remove unwanted remote-content contacts).

Good info there, and extraordinarily polite to a rude user!  Excellent!  
Now I want to hire you to join my team!  But I'd hate to lose you off
of the Thunderbird team, since I've been a Thunderbird fan for so many 
years, and Netscape Messenger before that.

> *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 325458 ***

And I automatically got added to the CC list of bug 325458.  Nice!

Keep up the good work!

--Fred