1133616 - What the hell has happened to the email client

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[donk]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:35.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0
Build ID: 20150122214805

Steps to reproduce:

First, you "fix" something with typing in email addresses, and then everything is screwed up and no one in my address book is remembered.  I have to type in the first name and then hit the space bar to get things to actualize.  Then, I can't send messages.  I don't know what you are doing but things are getting screwed up on a consistent basis rather than improving.


Actual results:

Look above


Expected results:

I should be able to begin typing in an email address (as in the beginning) and it will fill in.  I should be able to send messages without having to try 3 or 4 times.  This is getting to be a PITA.  

Come on guys, you are supposed to be improving not screwing the original reason I used you up.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Donk, your concerns are appreciated and indeed in the process of fixing bugs, implementing enhancements and necessary technical changes, we had introduced some UX-problems of the type you mention.

Pls verify that you're using the latest version of TB (31.4.0) where most of these problems should be fixed. We're still rolling out fixes so otherwise it'll be fixed in the near future.

It's also true that the result sets for autocomplete might have changed recently depending on your personal data sets and the popularity of each contact; which was required to fix previous search failures, so we're not going to roll that back.

The best way to find your contacts reliably 100% of the time without getting distracting results is this:
From the contact's properties dialogue (in Address book), define a unique value for the "Nickname" field:
Name: John Doe
Nickname: jd#
Thereafter, you can just type "jd#" in the recipient field and you'll always find John straight away.

Also, please do this:
- check your "Collected Addresses" address book and remove all addresses which you might have added just for the sake of showing remote content, but not for actual correspondance.
- Move those remote-content addresses to the dedicated section in Settings:
Tools > Settings > Privacy > External Email contents > Exceptions
add those addresses for which you then allow/deny remote content.
Sorry for the inconvenience, the old design was bad and we've recently fixed it; unfortunately we can't make the transition for you because we can't tell which addresses are only remote permissions and which are actual correspondence contacts.

The current implementation of popularityIndex (frequency) is badly designed because it does not have a time factor (recency); so contacts you might have used a lot long ago might still get to the top. We have several bugs filed for that and are looking for volunteers to fix them (TB is almost fully maintained by volunteers).

Your bug report is incomplete as it lacks any orderly detail for reproduction (like details about the properties of affected cards, and in which order they show up, and which order you'd expect);
it's also invalid because it covers more than issue.
Also, please mind the tone of your report; we're working hard and without payment to improve things for you, and you don't pay for our software, so it's rude to just walk in and bluntly accuse us of "screwing up". Also, please ensure sufficient understanding and more accuracy before making blanket statements: it's simply not true that "no one is remembered" from your address book. Algorithms / result sets might have changed, yes, but without change there can be no progress, and other users will complain about that or not use the software because it's not versatile enough.

But I believe all the underlying issues of your bug report are covered, so there's actually nothing we can do here.

Comment 2

[Fred Stluka]

Thomas,

Thanks for the complete, polite and very restrained reply to a somewhat
impolite bug report.  And thanks again to the entire Thunderbird team for 
continued excellent support!

--Fred Stluka