1671679 - Recipient autocomplete no longer showing most frequently used result addresses on top after update to TB 78 (popularityIndex broken?)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[David Walker]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.101 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

After upgrading to TB 78.3.2, autocompletion of addresses no longer seems to prioritize previously-selected addresses. It also seems to return more matches, making the loss of prioritization worse. For example, if I want to cc myself, I type "David" (a common name in my ~1500 entry address book) in the address window...

Actual results:

The address popup includes a large number of possible completions, and mine is more than half-way down the list.

Expected results:

My personal address is almost always the one I select, so I expect it to be at the top of the list. Prior to my recent upgrade (from 68.*), Thunderbird would do this.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Geoff, if this is true, we're in hot soup because this has the potential to render autocomplete pretty useless for large ABs. Is it possibe that AB migration broke our autocomplete frequency "algorithm" involving popularityIndex property of cards (or their email addresses?), which ranks cards with a high popularityIndex value higher in autocomplete results?

Hello David, thanks much for offering this feedback!

Here's some background: On each card, TB should have a property called popularityIndex, which is a pretty dull counter of how often you have used that address (or card?) (for sending, I believe). So if your report is right, popularityIndex might be broken. :-/

As a sidenote, unfortunately, even when it works, the dull counter is where it ends. Changing to another address might take long for TB to relearn, because popularityIndex is not exposed to user via UI, AND TB does not have an algorithm which would also consider the "recency" in addition to "frequency". Not having the combo algorithm aka "frecency" is bug 382415, which I have advocated for.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

https://searchfox.org/comm-central/search?path=&q=popularityIndex

Comment 3

[David Walker]

Hmmm... I had to switch to using TBSync for my Google contacts when I upgraded. I suppose that zeroed all of my popularityIndex's? I would think, though, that that would also mean that it would not take a long time for TB to relearn.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

likely regression

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

We have 2-3 million users on 78, so unless this is a very recent regression then not many users have noticed.

Comment 6

[John Bieling (:TbSync)]

Could you verify this without TbSync?

Comment 7

[David Walker]

I think that's it. I exported my TBSync'd contact folder and imported it into a local folder, then unchecked the contacts in my TBSync configuration for Google. After that, address autocompletion picked my preferred "David" contact by default after the first time I selected it from the long list.

FYI, if it's relevant, I'd been using gContactSync before upgrading to 78 and TBSync for Office365 (calendar, not contacts). After upgrading, gContactSync was no longer compatible, so I installed the Google add-ons for TBSync for my contacts.

Comment 8

[John Bieling (:TbSync)]

I will check for this in TbSync. Closing this bug as invalid.