53382 - too many address book matches, and doesn't match any of them

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect, P3)

Description

[Akkana Peck]

If I bring up up a compose window, and type "akkana" in the recipient
field, then pause, a menu pops up offering me the following choices:
[e-mail]
akkana <[e-mail]>
Akkana Peck <akkana@netscape...>
This can't be the intended behavior ... they're all the same address!
It shouldn't show me multiple instances of the same address.

Comment 1

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

The name is different in each of those addresses, even if the email address is 
the same, they are not identical. Therefore we show all of them. How can I 
decide which one is the correct one!

Also, I have some friends that share an email address. Depending to which one I 
want to address the message, I chose the address with the correct name.

Comment 2

[Akkana Peck]

Note that none of these addresses is actually in my address book (they're me,
why would I need to put myself in my address book?).  They're all being
generated somehow by mozilla, so whatever it's doing to generate them, it's
doing three different things in different places, then not noticing that they
should all be the same.

If I actually had two different entries in my address book which had different
names but the same address, I could see presenting a menu.

Comment 3

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

Those addresses are comming from the collected addressbook. Perhaps the solution 
would be to show addresses from the collected AB if we already found one with 
the same email address in other regular AB.

Comment 4

[Akkana Peck]

They shouldn't be: I have
user_pref("mail.collect_email_address", false);
set in my prefs.js, so I shouldn't have a collected address book at all.

But I agree that we shouldn't show addresses from the collected AB if there's
already one in the regular AB.

Comment 5

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

but does your collected AB is empty?

Comment 6

[Akkana Peck]

Aha, I had a "history.mab" despite my preference.  I assume this is the
collected abook? 

Comment 7

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

right, it's the collected AB. Turning off the pref prevent to collect new 
addresses but that doesn't prevent Autocomplete to use the existing addresses.

Comment 8

[Akkana Peck]

I've been hitting a more serious version of this.  I have an alias in my PAB for
"psc", but when I type psc in the addressing field, I get a popup offering the
one in my PAB, another similar one that's probably from the history AB (which is
mandatory, the pref to turn it off is ignored!), and finally, [e-mail].
 If I then hit tab, expecting that the mail will go to the one in my addressbook
since that's what 4.x always did, no autocompletion happens (I still see just
psc in the addressing field) and if I send the message, I'm not sure where it
ends up (maybe [e-mail], which was the third match, or maybe just the
local address psc, which amounts to the same thing), but it didn't go to my PAB
alias as expected.  I've lost a couple of mail messages this way, not finding
out until later that they hadn't been sent to the right address.

Request rtm consideration because it's hard to imaging using a mailer where one
can't make aliases for commonly-used addresses.  It makes the PAB useless.

Comment 9

[selmer (gone)]

rtm-, this may be annoying, but it's not a stop-ship.  The addresses you want
are there if you pick them.

Comment 10

[fenella]

Assign it to myself..

Comment 11

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

remove keyword dataloose which is not justfied in this case.

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

still see this problem when using a current version?

Comment 13

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESO INCO per lack of answer to previous question. If you feel this change was made in error, please respond to this bug with your reasons why.