1683064 - Non-pillified invalid/incomplete/placeholder addresses not saved to draft when saving composition

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect, P3)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.66 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I use an addon for my email list, which translates codes (e.g. "{{Email}}") to the corresponding value.
Obviously {{Email}} isn't a valid email address, but until now this had no side effect.

Actual results:

Version 78 changed previous behaviour : now, such an invalid email address is omitted when saving the email to Draft folder ("Save" button).
Strangely, this problem does not occur when the email is saved automatically to Draft after some period of time.

Expected results:

As before, the email should be saved as-is to Draft folder ("Save" button), even with an invalid email address.

Comment 1

[[e-mail]]

(In reply to [e-mail] from comment #0)

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.66 Safari/537.36

I use an addon for my email list, which translates codes (e.g. "{{Email}}") to the corresponding value.
Obviously {{Email}} isn't a valid email address, but until now this had no side effect.

Steps to reproduce:

Write a new email, enter <{{Email}}> as the recipient, clic on the "Save" button.

Actual results:

Version 78 changed previous behaviour : now, such an invalid email address is omitted when saving the email to Draft folder ("Save" button).
Strangely, this problem does not occur when the email is saved automatically to Draft after some period of time.

Expected results:

As before, the email should be saved as-is to Draft folder ("Save" button), even with an invalid email address.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

STR

1. compose new msg
2. type an invalid/incomplete/placeholder address without @ into To: (without confirming that in any way, it must not be pillified), e.g.:

• '{{Email}}' as an addon placeholder, or
• 'John' as a recipient placeholder (email address not at hand, but let me type him in so that I won't forget).

3. Save draft (Ctrl+S) whilst address has not been pillified yet, and look at draft in msg reader wrt To: address

Actual

• non-pillified invalid/placeholder recipient like '{{Email}}' or 'John' has not been saved in the To: field of the draft message.
• Closing the message after saving will silently discard any "invalid" (placeholder) recipients.

Expected

I think it's a fair expectation that even incomplete/invalid/placeholder addresses which have not been pillified yet must be saved.
If that requires that we pillify them before saving, then so be it, but we need to save them. (Worse if we're inconsistent as reporter claims and Auto-save will actually do better than manual save).

By comparison, you wouldn't want Word to skip your unfished words when saving, right?
Excel will also save an unfinished formula which you're still editing.
Imho, saving must always be "save as-is".

Alex? Maybe the behaviour has changed already with some of the related bugs recently? (see next comment)

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Related bugs:
Bug 1674054 - All non-pillified recipients (pasted, typed) silently discarded when clicking [Send] button directly
Bug 1679848 - Send button remains disabled in spite of valid (non-pillified) recipient address(es) and no UI clues why

Comment 4

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Not fixed by the related bugs, this issue is still present.
Indeed, we should save all the written values, pillified or not.

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Attachment: Screenshot 1: Draft after using workaround: Pillify recipient placeholder before saving

Hi Gravsten, you're quite right! This doesn't seem right.

Fortunately, there's a workaround to save invalid/placeholder addresses to a draft:

• Press Enter or Tab after typing your placeholder address (input blur will not do the trick), which will change your placeholder into a recipient item (aka pill). Save now.
• Draft will have the recipient placeholder as expected. It will show as To: {{Email}} < >, but the actual source code just has To: {{Email}}. However, when you edit the draft, it will go back to {{Email}} < >, so you'd have to correct that manually (press Enter on selected pill to edit) if you need it correct in composition. The < > are never saved to the draft.

So if {{Email}} is correctly saved in draft, is that sufficient for your addon to do the trick? What's the name of the addon?

Comment 6

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Attachment: Screenshot 2: Workaround: Pillify recipient placeholder before saving as draft

So here's how "pillified" needs to look in your composition.