450076 - on hover, display sender information for senders in address book

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 243631

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[wintogreen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: 

When I hover the cursor over an email address in the threadpane (and perhaps even in the message window), I want Thunderbird to display a little popup showing me selected information about that sender (especially name). This would apply only if that address is already in one of my address books.

Why? I receive a lot of emails from people I know and who are in my address book but where the sender's name is NOT included in the "From" message header. E.g., instead of the From line saying "Firstname Lastname <[e-mail]>", it just says "<[e-mail]>". This seems to be the norm from messages sent by cell phone here in Japan, and I get tons of messages from people writing from their cell phones.

Gmail handles such messages wonderfully. In Gmail, if you hover the cursor over a known sender's email address in the message list or when reading the individual message, you get a popup showing the sender's name, email address, and even photo (if you have one on file). It's immensely useful.

I want Thunderbird to have the same kind of feature. Minimally, it would display the sender's name (if already in the address book). Ideally, however, it would be configurable, so that the Thunderbird user can select which items from the address book card get displayed on hover. E.g., I might choose to display the person's name, home address, and a custom field. In the future, this feature could be further enhanced to include even more advanced sender information such as date of last email exchange.

Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
Desired behavior:
1. Hover over an email address in the threadpane (or message window).
2. Selected information about the sender will display in a popup.
3. It will stay there until you move the cursor away or until you right-click on the address.

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

The core part of this bug is bug 243631 - that bug will be replacing the email address with the name of the person if they are in your address book. Hovering over the name will give the email address as well.

The second part (extra details) is bug 342580.

Marking as duplicate of bug 243631 as that is the bug that will give us most win initially.