1613243 - Email address autocomplete suggestions have inconsistent ordering

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Conor O]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0

Steps to reproduce:

I type a name in the 'To' line within the message compose window.
Thunderbird offers a set of matching names from the address book.

Actual results:

Thunderbird offers a set of matching names from the address book.
However, it seems to offer these in an inconsistent order; I don't get the same ordering each time I start a new email. This is awkward when the word(s) which I type match many entries from the address book.

I think that this is a regression; this used to work properly in the past, but perhaps not for the last few months. (i.e. it changed sometime in the autumn of 2019)

Expected results:

If I have multiple people in my address book called Dave, it should show these in some well-defined order.
I would prefer if it showed the entries which had been used most recently at the top, because this would normally a useful suggestion.
At the very least, given the same words typed into the 'To:' field, it should not randomise the list each time.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I would prefer if it showed the entries which had been used most recently at the top, because this would normally a useful suggestion.

That's now it's set up yes. Of course if you happen to send do many Dave's and they have almost the same ranking, it could change after you sent another mail.

Comment 2

[Conor O]

In my case, it most definitely is not giving any preference to any names which have been used recently. Is there any way to find out anything about the internals of how it makes these decisions? Perhaps I can turn on some specific logging?

Comment 3

[Conor O]

I have done some more investigation. I have all of my contacts in an address book controlled by TbSync (https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbsync/), and it seems to be related to this.
If I test with some contacts which I create explicitly within the normal "Personal Address Book", then Thunderbird does indeed offer recently used entries first.
I will close this bug here, and raise another with TbSync.
Many thanks for your patience and help.