1183801 - New Email Recipient Autocomplete Broken

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1012397

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[efwb001]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:37.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/37.0
Build ID: 20150415140819

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open up a new message (or a reply/forward - doesn't matter).
2. In the 'To:' field, type the first couple letters of an email address (you can use your own to reproduce), then immediately hit tab (to go to the next field).


Actual results:

Depending on the entries in your address book, it will either leave the 'To:' field with the two letters you typed (obviously not a real email address), or will autocomplete someone who is not at all who you wanted to message (this person has those two letters somewhere in their name).

In the prior case, the full email address will be placed in the box (expected behavior) if you wait 5-10 seconds for the dropdown to finally appear.

In the latter case, you tell your boss all about your sex life.


Expected results:

Behavior should be identical to 24.8.1 and earlier.

The email address should have been placed in the 'To:' field. In prior versions, Thunderbird was capable of loading the correct autocomplete even after you'd tabbed away from the field, so you didn't have to wait. It also always produced the correct address, rather than picking one seemingly at random (e.g. typing 'pa' should never autocomplete the first Paul that comes to Thunderbird's mind).

This does not require LDAP or a remote address book to reproduce.

I'm guessing this isn't a bug, but something that was broken when adding new functionality because it wasn't obviously important. It appeared in the same version as the 'To:' fields changed colors on windows 7. 

This is a huge issue for me - I'm reinstalling 24.8.1 and considering abandoning Thunderbird. Too much lost productivity and too many misrouted emails.

Thanks!

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

efwb001, thanks and you're right depending on scenario and speed autocomplete doesn't work as expected. We have a range of bugs filed against that and we're working on them as a matter of priority.

I'll mark this dupe of bug 1012397, which is the "does not autocomplete at all" part, which can be worked around by waiting for suggestions to appear before tabbing/confirming.
The other part looks like bug 1130858, where stale suggestions still hang around if you're too fast, so again, waiting a second or two will work around it.
My favorite beast is bug 1152517 because it's so cunning.
Let us know if you see anything which is not covered by those bugs and bugs listed in their "see also" fields.