399329 - space in bcc or cc field forces warning dialog on user when sending

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[art zerger]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/2.0.0.7
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.6 (20070728)

 is not a valid e-mail address because it is not of the form user@host.  you must correct it before sending the email.
 
come on guys - some simple text cleanup and parsing should weed out a field that has just one or more spaces in it and not generate a warning or dialog message to the user - this is simple UI 101 basics!


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.compose mail
2.put space in bcc field
3.
Actual Results:  
press send button

Expected Results:  
mail should be sent not have warning dialog to user!

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

And that space absolutely certainly means that the user intended to not have a bcc, rather than meaning that they accidently copy-pasted a space instead of the address that they wanted to have bcc'ed?

Comment 2

[art zerger]

Obviously another case of pig headed and tarnished ego.  Every other mail program out there, outlook, aol etc, etc... Can handle this without prompting the user with an error dialog.  I truly could care less if you fix it or not.  Obviously responses like yours to people who take the time to give feedback is a prime reason people get turned off reporting problems in the first place!

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Oh? It was an honest question: how can you tell the difference between an accidental space that meant nothing, and an accidental space that meant you didn't get the address you wanted?

Comment 4

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

Still a bug? (no response for around 8 months)

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

This also happens with cc field. I don't see it as a bug, but (like philor) as detecting a potential incomplete task on the part of the composer.

However 
a) this only happens if address autocomplete is off, because when autocomplete is on it won't allow a blank field - but it might only be because of bug 486501
b) when autocomplete is off, thunderbird is not issuing such a message  (but seammonkey does [1]) - i.e. Send fails silently which is not good, except for blinking red cursor indicating incomplete address

a) and b) may both be accessibility issues. Do we want a follow up bug for b) and wontfix this bug?

[1] SM issues 
 " " is not a valid e-mail address because it is not of the form user@host. You must correct it before sending the e-mail.

Comment 6

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> b) when autocomplete is off, thunderbird is not issuing such a message  (but
> seammonkey does [1]) - i.e. Send fails silently which is not good, except for
> blinking red cursor indicating incomplete address

This is indeed an accessibility issue in many ways:
a) Screen readers won't notice and wonder why sending the message fails on them.
b) color-blind people may have trouble seeing that the blinking cursor is red.

Comment 7

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

Confirming per comment #6. Haven't checked for a dupe though.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

filed Bug 499723 on the accessibility issue -  insufficient warning on invalid destination address

bucking this bug back to unconfirmed to await Bryan comment.

Comment 9

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Just tested this out for myself and I don't see an error dialog at all.  Instead I just get a silent fail, which is a bit worse.  Not sure if I'm reproducing this incorrectly.

I think an automatic trim of the entry area would make sense.  I filed bug 499766 to check for empty paste events based off philor's comments as I think that's a use case we can understand and want to solve.  Otherwise entering a space via the space bar doesn't seem like something we need to support.

I would think if we trimmed empty space from the entry area we would get an interaction like this.

1. enter [e-mail] in addr space 1 as To: (press enter, next line)
2. enter ' ' (empty space) for addr space 2 as CC: (press enter, next line)
2.1 selection moves to next line
2.2 empty line is removed

This allows for the selection to remain, if you chose CC, entered nothing and hit enter you'd be on another CC line but the previous line would remove itself.

Assuming we fix bug 499766 then I would think at point 2. or 2.2 we would warn the person if they pasted nothing into the address area.

Comment 10

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Worksforme on TB68 and TB78, both don't warn in this case.
In TB78, you can no longer start your input with typing a space, and pasted outer spaces will be trimmed on pill creation or blur (would be nice if they disappeared on pasting if the input value starts or ends with spaces).

(In reply to Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw] from comment #9)

Assuming we fix bug 499766 then I would think at point 2. or 2.2 we would
warn the person if they pasted nothing into the address area.

I think in terms of accessibility issues, we should warn blind users if they paste whitespace (bug 499766 which I have just reopened).
Red cursor no longer occurs for this case by default.

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #5)

This also happens with cc field. I don't see it as a bug, but (like philor)
as detecting a potential incomplete task on the part of the composer.

That's bug 499766.

However
a) this only happens if address autocomplete is off, because when
autocomplete is on it won't allow a blank field - but it might only be
because of bug 486501

Obsolete, you can paste whitespace only and send with whitespace and focus still in that address field.

b) when autocomplete is off, thunderbird is not issuing such a message
i.e. Send fails silently which is not good, except
for blinking red cursor indicating incomplete address

Probably obsolete, Wayne, is it still possible to switch autocomplete off? if yes, how?

a) and b) may both be accessibility issues. Do we want a follow up bug for
b) and wontfix this bug?

Any outstanding minor issues, pls file them if still wanted.