365379 - Add option to strip off extraneous quote marks from email addresses

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 273884

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Rich Wales]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: version 1.5.0.9 (20061207)

I wish there were an option in Thunderbird to hide extraneous quote marks in the e-mail addresses of incoming messages.

This is a particularly annoying problem for me because most of my co-workers use Outlook, which has a nasty tendency to produce addresses with apostrophes (single quotes) around the full name -- like this:  'John Smith' <[e-mail]>  -- or sometimes with BOTH single AND double quotes around the name, like this:  "'John Smith'" <[e-mail]>

These quote-mangled full names mess up the sorting of names when, e.g., I want to sort a mail folder by recipient name (the quoted names show up first because they start with quote marks).  The single quotes (apostrophes) also mess up the entries in my address book.

Can anything be done to clean up addresses mangled in this way?  If people are not willing to add an option to the preferences to do this, would it be possible to write an extension to intercept addresses in message headers (at a very early stage of processing, before the addresses would wind up in the main window or the address book) and do the required cleanup?
 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Get someone who uses Outlook to send you e-mail.