448692 - Move "Show only display name..." to Addressbook View menu

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Martin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008071615 Fedora/3.0.1-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: 

It is not very logic that "Show only display name for people in my address book" is hidden in the Advanced tab. Compared to the other options in there, this option is no where near "advanced".

I therefore propose that is it moved the the Address Book View menu.

See mock up.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Martin]

Attachment: Mock up

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

If anything this is a message display preference, it affects the header display of messages, it is not affecting the Address book view menu.

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Though it might belong more under Display somewhere... (esp if we wanna add a new tab)

Comment 4

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

This is a bit of an odd preference which I think could be removed if the display of contacts were changed through out the UI.

If someone wants to remove this, I'd plus that change however I don't think it should gain more visibility than it already has.

Comment 5

[Martin]

I think it sounds like a good idea to loose this option.

Should I change the name of the bug to "Remove "Show only display name..."?

Comment 6

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

Go for it!

Comment 7

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I disagree with removing UI for this. I really don't like the functionality at all (though I understand some people do, but I also know many others don't), and keep it off all the time. People change e-mails fairly often and it's really annoying not knowing if you're sending to the correct address.

Comment 8

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

I completely understand what you're describing but I think we should file that problem as a separate bug to be fixed in a different way.

Showing the email address doesn't actually address the problem, you still have to know if it's correct address or not.  Instead I think a solution of suggesting an alternative email address at composition time might help solve the situation.  This way if you clicked on someone to write a new message to you could be reminded that they have a new email address they've started emailing you with.  (just a thought)

And like I was mentioning about changing the display of contacts I think we can show the email address a message came from all the time, we just need to change the look.  If you take a look at some of the new designs for the message reader I've changed the header display to include email addresses (just click details) because it is important, but it shouldn't trump the person as a concept.

http://clarkbw.net/designs/msg-reader/std-msg-reader-w-expanding-headers.html

Comment 9

[Pete Riley]

If you followed the original bugs, there were a lot of very strong opinions of whether people wanted to see email addresses or just the display names.  I think it would be a mistake to remove this option completely.  If you do, someone will just open a new bug to restore the option, and the war will begin again.

> [...] I think we can show the email address a message came from
> all the time, we just need to change the look.
I think it's great if you want to make things look nicer (especially if we'll have more control of this in our userchrome.css file than we do now).  However, I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all solution.  Making the font size of the email address smaller is not the same thing as hiding the email address.

For people who want to hide email addresses for known senders, there are at least two advantages:  (1) it gives clean visual feedback that these people are in our address book (especially nice when there are a lot of people in the TO header and there is a mixture of known/unknown people) and (2) it reduces the amount of details that we have to read, and thus also saves precious screen space.

Comment 10

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

I have to agree with Mark in Comment #2 here, this is a display wide pref and so it can't really be moved into the address book.  Marking WONTFIX then since we'll keep it where it is for now.  

Though Magnus was completely right (as usual) in Comment #3 as I created bug 456872 for having an adv. display pref.

Comment 11

[Aaron Lawrence]

For a more logical reason as to Wontfix: The address book "View" menu relates to the view in the Address book window. Not to the "View" of addresses in general. 

Still I do think that the pref should be moved to Message Display panel in TB. Did someone open a bug for that?