1424486 - Quick Filter Toolbar is not parsing senders' or recipients' name

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 460737

(Thunderbird :: Search, defect)

Description

[pevr]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20170807000000

Steps to reproduce:

I used the Quick Filter Toolbar to search emails sent by or to “John Doe” whose email address is “[e-mail]”.


Actual results:

No email were found, although there are many ones.


Expected results:

It should have retrieved the emails sent by or to “John Doe”.

In my address book, some people do not have their name in their email address (i.e. John Doe's address is [e-mail]). When searching “John's emails” with either “John”, “Doe” or  “John Doe” in the Quick Filter Toolbar, no message from “[e-mail]” is found.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Happens in safe mode? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/safe-mode-thunderbird
Anything on tools > error console?

Comment 2

[Steve]

Yes, it happens also in safe mode and no error output. Without looking at any code, I'd say the "foo <[e-mail]>" foo part is just not used for filtering.

Comment 3

[Daniel Huber]

I am able to reproduce this problem, too. I believe the issue arises from people who have an email address without their real name in it.

Ideally, an email will have address like "Jane Doe" <[e-mail]>, but sometimes it is just the email part (i.e., <[e-mail]>). If I have Jane Doe in my address book, the UI will replace the email with the real name and just show "Jane Doe". However, the quick search bar will not show the result if I type in "Jane Doe" because it appears to be searching the original information rather than the translated information.

From a user's perspective, this is difficult to understand, since the name is right there in the UI, but the search does not appear to work. However, assuming that is the underlying algorithm, it is working as implemented. I suggest refactoring to do the search on the translated address rather than the raw address.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

DOes this still reproduce?

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Perhaps duplicate of bug 460737

Comment 6

[B.J. Herbison]

The issue described in comment 3 still exists. I created an address book entry for one of my e-mail addresses under the name "spain ireland". When I view the message Thunderbird shows "spain ireland" [e-mail], but searching or filtering for spain doesn't find the message.

Delete the entry in the address book and the "name" actually in the message is shown. (And that name was always filterable and searchable.)

Comment 3 says " I believe the issue arises from people who have an email address without their real name in it" but it's worse than that as the address book entry overrides any real (or fake) name in included in the message (at least for the cases I've tried).

Since comment 0 says the name is in their address book it does look like bug 460737, but the scope of the issue is wider than the subject of that bug report as the problem exists for both searching and filtering.