1407696 - Address book alias lookup too slow in Compose and aborts when leaving To or CC field via Enter key

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1151520

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Shahrukh]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
Build ID: 20170926190823

Steps to reproduce:

1. Enter an alias in the To: field (nickname in my address book, but could also be a unique first name in my address book that expands to a unique email address).
2. Rapidly hit Enter to go to the next To: field to enter a second or subsequent recipient.
3. Optionally repeat Step 2 to enter more recipient names.


Actual results:

Unless I wait a good half second (an eternity for even a moderate typist), the nickname or alias lookup will NOT take place, i.e., the conversion to email address will abort when I leave the field to enter the next field and whatever I typed will remain. If I try to send the email, I will get an error
xxx <> is not a valid email address (where xxx is the text I typed that did not get properly looked up).

Cc: field exhibits same behaviour.

If I use Tab to exit the To: or Cc: field (instead of Enter) it gets looked up properly (with a small delay) UNLESS I've already started typing rapidly in the next field before the lookup completes, in which case the lookup again aborts and leaves my "invalid" alias in the To: field. (Anyway, this is not a workaround since Tab takes me to the Subject: field and if I want to enter 2 or more recipients I have to use Enter to create another To: or Cc: line.)

This was not a problem in earlier versions of Thunderbird (perhaps 5 or more years ago). I immediately noticed when it started happening but just lived with it at the time, figuring that since it never happened before, "someone" would recognize and fix it, but no such luck.


Expected results:

1. Address lookups especially from local address books as in this case should not take that long in the first place. One solution would be to speed it up so that it would be virtually impossible for someone to exit the field before the lookup happened (though I can hit Enter pretty quickly ...).
2. The real solution is for alias lookups and translations to be happening in their own threads or whatever the technical solution is, so that the user does not have to insert his own artificial pauses in his typing for Thunderbird to catch up with him for something as basic as address lookup.

(On that same note, at some point, probably when this problem started, a negative feature of comma-separated entries not working was also introduced. So I have to hit Enter ... LONG Pause ......... after each entry. Perhaps this could be fixed while we're at it as well. It's much more user-friendly to be able to see half a dozen recipients' names/email addresses on 2 lines than having to scroll through 6 lines in the header section of the compose window just to confirm that everyone I wanted to include is there.)