Closed Bug 133960 Opened 22 years ago Closed 21 years ago

RFE: New Mail alert should show mail account name, not login name for mailserver

Categories

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

x86
Windows 2000
enhancement
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 225413

People

(Reporter: jesse.houwing, Assigned: sspitzer)

References

(Depends on 1 open bug)

Details

Currently the Mail alert slide up thingy shows the login name for the account
that has new mail.

This should show the name of that account instead, because for many people the
loginname is just a weird bunch of characters or in my case numbers that mean
nothing.
QA Contact: olgam → gchan
Summary: Alerter should show mail account name, not login name for mailserver → New Mail alert should show mail account name, not login name for mailserver
Based on the specs, it is intended to use the
username of the account. The other alternative
was to use the entire email address.

I don't believe we will change this.

Marking this as enhancement and adding RFE to subj line

ccing jglick. Jennifer?Scott I'll let you decide whether we
we want to mark this as won't fix or new.
Severity: normal → enhancement
Summary: New Mail alert should show mail account name, not login name for mailserver → RFE: New Mail alert should show mail account name, not login name for mailserver
reassigning to mscott and takig seth off list
Assignee: sspitzer → mscott
In my case my account name is: "Student mail" and the corresponding username is:
"s9807543" I'd say the first option sound much better. This is also the name
that was chosen by the user, which is also to it's advantage in my opinion...

Was this never considered? Or was the username valued above this option?
Confirming. User's choice is always a good point. Especially if you have lots of
similar accounts.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Both Account Name and User Name were considered. The default name used for 
"Account Name" is the email address (may folks don't change the default). 
The reason User Name was initially picked was because it is in most cases 
shorter than User Name and horizontal space is an issue. You can see samples 
here: http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/specs/mailnotify/#Alert. This is still 
subject to change if necessary.
Can't you then just show the first 250 pixels of the mail address? (eg
"j.houwing@studen..." has new mail. That way at least something familiar to the
user get's shown.

The same could apply to the account name, which would then be the most logical
choice.

One more thing on this, if it was chosen to save space, why is it then that if
two mail alerts are shown at the same time (or some time ago even three in my
case) they get shown side by side? That way even the short username is way too
long. But this is probably an other bug.
I agree with the idea to show the account name instead of the user name for this
reasons :
- You can put the account name you want. It's not true with the username.
- You can truncate to XX character the account name, like that the user can
adjust the account name if he wants.
- The account name is more easy to understand in the little new message box when
you have more than one mail account in your mozilla (I have 4 account POP and IMAP).
 
*** Bug 167920 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
The account name shouldn't be too long either, because it is shown in the
mailnews folder pane in bold case. With the current with of my folder pane there
isn't room for much more than 10-15 characters.

Also, it is not unlikely that a user has several mail accounts with the same
username (e.g. their first name). Or that a user has several usernames that
consist of "random" characters (like "mbx10432"). (The latter is in fact the
reason that I am annoyed by the current behaviour.)
*** Bug 131026 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
As far as usability and end-user comfort goes, I agree completely with the
comments here that the notification should not be the user name, but the account
name.  Some of the alternate designed at the above-posted
http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/specs/mailnotify/#Alert link would seem to take
greater advantage of screen space, particularly #5, which takes advantage of not
only a smaller, cleaner looking font, but a more 'vertical' usage by double
stacking.  It could be double stacked if the account name is too long:

    someone@somelongser...
    has 1 new messages

Or for a shorter server:

    someone@shortserver.com
    has 2 new messages
*** Bug 197032 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 199854 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 200904 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
If the spec claims that because of space issues it's better to display

  "047859 has 1 new message"

instead of

  "joe@sixpack.net has 1 new message"

then that does not seem like a good trade-off to me.
why not do:
silly@example.com has
1 new message

-- that way the number of messages is flush left. yes it wastes more vertical
space, but who cares?
Assignee: mscott → jglick
In my case, I have the same username on two different mail accounts, so the 
information in the alert is ambiguous.  If bug 145982 is ever addressed, the 
alert could be even more confusing.
*** Bug 212966 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 209711 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
.
Assignee: jglick → sspitzer
QA Contact: gchan → esther
*** Bug 218553 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 215534 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
rising attention
Flags: blocking1.6a?
*** Bug 220634 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Depends on: 66860
It seems that there's a workaround:
I did create a new account but as I didn't remember the username I wrote my
name, and when I finished filling the data I checked the proper username and
fixed it in the account settings.

The nice side is that new whenever I get mail in that account the alert pops up
with my name (instead of the username like the rest of my accounts do). So I
checked prefs.js and saw these lines:

user_pref("mail.server.server9.name", "the name that I wrote");
user_pref("mail.server.server9.realuserName", "the username");

I tested creating a realuserName entry for the other acounts and then the alert
shows .name while the username shown in the Mail&news account settings is
realuserName (and the one used to login with the server).

So until someone tells me that something is wrong about this and I'm killing
someone on the otherside of the world everytime my notification pops up with a
meaningful name in them, I will think about this as another hidden feature that
no one did notice.
I've tried the above workaround with limited success.  Alfonso Martinez, could 
you be a little more specific as to what values you used for those preferences?
Also, are you using POP or IMAP mail?

I believe you meant that rather than "mail.server.serverX.name", the preference 
that should be tweaked is "mail.server.serverX.userName" -- this in addition to 
adding "mail.server.serverX.realUserName".  However, I don't see any evidence 
that the realUserName preference is used, in my POP accounts.

What I did, that seemed to work for some accounts, is change the "userName" pref 
(e.g.) from "mcow" to "mcow@well" -- the new value being how I wanted the 
account to appear in the notification.  I added a "realUserName" pref for the 
account, set to "mcow".  This worked for the Well and one other account, but not 
for a third. I created a POP3 log to check what was going on.

For the Well mail server, the POP login string went out as:
   SEND: USER mcow@well      instead of     SEND: USER mcow
Apparently the POP software simply strips off the @xxxx portion of a login name; 
authentication worked fine.

If I use some random string in "userName", login fails.

A different account with the same changes to the preferences doesn't use the 
plaintext authorization, but instead uses some secure login (NTLM, CRAM-MD5 or 
SCRAM-MD5, I'm not sure which).  This account fails if the user name isn't 
precisely the user name.

An additional drawback to the workaround is that the Password dialog displays 
the account name as "mcow@well@well.com".
Maybe I did some mistake in my previous post, so I'll try again:

I'm using IMAP with the 2003 10 28 04 nigthly in wXP, no encryption or security
settings of any kind sending or getting mesages.

looking at the prefs.js before I made the change I see that this is the name
that it's showing in the popup:
user_pref("mail.server.server9.userName", "alfonso");
that was the user name that I wrote at first when I created the account, then
after closing the wizard I went to the account settings and wrote the right
username (a mess of letters and numbers like isG349c for example)
I can see that this data is stored in this preference:
user_pref("mail.server.server9.realuserName", "isG349c");

so I changed the .userName preference with the email address and now that is
what I get when the alert popups.
I changed another account creating the realuserName entry with the user for that
account and putting the email in the .userName and that one seems to work fine too.

I missed a bit: after starting Mozilla it the asked me for the password for both
accounts, but I don't remember if it was in a proper way or it had two @ as Mike
Cowperthwaite has pointed out.

So if this works only for me then I'm sorry, I just tried to share this tip with
everyone else that is frustated as I was because the notification was almost
useless for me having several accounts and I can't remember which string of
numbers and letters applies to each account.
Actually, Alfonso, the mistake is mine: I used the wrong preference name:
   "realUserName"  instead of  "realuserName"
the difference being the case of the 'U' character.  I discovered this by trying 
exactly the steps you outlined; I then saw that the account had one preference 
set with each name.

After correcting, Mozilla uses the preference exactly as you described 
originally.  Yay!
I've discovered an apparent bug with the preferences-hack described above: 
apparently the folder preferences in Account Settings|Copies&Folders are keyed 
to the 'userName' preference: the Sent, Drafts and Templates folders are all 
specified using the exact text of 'userName'.  For instance:
 user_pref("mail.identity.id1.fcc_folder", "mailbox://mcow@mail.well.com/Sent");

In my case, I noticed this because I went looking for mail I'd sent and couldn't 
find it -- it wasn't saved due to this glitch.  So, I've backed out the change 
and am using only 'userName' again.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 225413 ***
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 21 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
verified dup
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
Product: Browser → Seamonkey
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