79013 - [RFE] address completion based on nickname

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

Description

[Dan Meek]

Mozilla (and also NS 6) appears to have abandoned the concept of nicknames and
allowing the user to address a message to a nickname, without the need for a
bunch of alternative addresses to pop up and waste the sender's time choosing
from among them.  In Netscape 4.xx, the setting was "When there are multiple
addresses found, Accept what I have typed."

This feature is the only reason I have used NS for many years.

Is this feature gone completely from Mozilla?

Comment 1

[Håkan Waara]

not a critical bug, setting as enhancement. fixing summary and confirming

Comment 2

[Caspy7]

I have nick names for all the people I email often.  This is one of the great 
things I love about the Netscape composition window.  I can enter several email 
addresses very quickly by typing a short name and hitting enter.

I do think that this an important usability feature that many people 
are dependent on and those migrating from NS4.x are used to, and should be 
thought of as less of an enhancement/extra and more of a feature that should be 
included in Mozilla (at least for 1.0).  
I'd submit a patch if I had any programming skills, this seems as though it 
would be an easy thing to impliment.  Anyone?  Bueller...?

Comment 3

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

Nickname autocompletion is working in Mozilla. I don't see any problem! WFM

Comment 4

[Dan Meek]

It appears that you do not understand my beef.  Autocompletion "works" in 
Mozilla but not in the way it works under Netscape
4.xx and prior versions.  There, typing in, say, dwm, then <cr> automatically 
inserts Daniel W. Meek's email address in the To:
field.  With Mozilla, it does not.  Instead, it opens (eventually) a list of 
potentially correct addresses.  This forces the
user to first wait for the list to appear and then to scroll down and try to 
find the right address, even if "dwm" is the
nickname uniquely associated with Daniel W. Meek's email address in the address 
book.

Thus, compared with NS 3 or 4, the Mozilla autocompletion feature is grossly 
inefficient and will likely cause lots of users
(including me) to abandon Mozilla in favor of programs that handle this task 
better.  Eudora 5.x, for example, is less efficient
in this task than Netscape 4.xx but far more efficient than the current Mozilla.

Dan Meek
10949 S.W. 4th Avenue
Portland, OR  97219
503-293-9021 voice
503-293-9099 fax
[e-mail]

Comment 5

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

ok, I understand your concern now. Thanks for the clarification. The way it
works is that we alway show all the potential matches sorted in a specific order:

1) user input + default domain
2) nickname exact matches
3) display name exact matches
4) first name exact matches
5) last name exact matches
6) email address exact matches

7) nickname partial matches
8) display name partial matches
9) first name partial matches
10) last name partial matches
11) email address partial matches

12) multi-words partial matches

if the search return only one match, exact or partial, without counting the
default domain one, the user input is automatically completed using it (inline
autocompletion).

The only improvement I can see (without changing the whole world) is to be
smarter in the way we decide to do inline autocompletion. Maybe we should do it
if we have only one exact match whatever how many partial matches we have. I am
not sure we should do it if we have more than one exact match, that could lead
to a misaddressing of the message.

see
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/mailnews/addrbook/src/nsAbAutoCompleteSession.cpp#553

 

Comment 6

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

another solution would be to use a pref (with or without UI) to enable inline
autocompletion with 4 different levels:

0-never
1-only if one match (this is the current behavior)
2-only if one exact match, whatever how many partial match
3-if at least one exact match, use the first one
4-always, use the first match.

Comment 7

[Dan Meek]

Thanks for the fast response.  I think the solution is simpler than outlined in 
your last message.

The solution is to get rid of (or demote) the "user input + default domain" 
first option, which in my experience is never correct.  [To me, it appears 
entirely irrational to assume that a user wants by default to send email to her 
own domain.]  The first address listed should be the exact nickname match, just 
like NS 4.xx.  If the user simply hits return, then that address should be 
entered, just like NS 4.xx.  THIS IS THE ONLY CHANGE ON THIS FEATURE THAT I 
REALLY CARE ABOUT.

As for multiple exact nickname matches, that can happen.  NS 4.xx handles that 
merely by stating "Multiple Matches Found."  Hitting <cr> at that point enters 
as the address the user input plus default domain, which (as indicated above) is 
almost always wrong.  But at least the "multiple matches found" alerts the user 
to duplicate nicknames and causes the user to edit the address book, which is a 
good result.  The way NS 4.xx handles all this is acceptable.

If there is more than one exact match, Mozilla could list all of the exact 
matches and allow the user to select one.  That would be even better than NS 
4.xx and would still alert the users that duplicate nicknames exist.  But if 
there is only one exact match, the user should be able to just hit <cr> to enter 
the address for that exact match, without scrolling down to it from a list.

Comment 8

[Fernando Cassia]

FWIW, I agree with what Dan Meek and Mark said above 100%.

Comment 9

[Caspy7]

I agree with what Dan said.  Especially about using the default domain.  I think
it should either be dropped to the bottom of the list or dropped entirely.  
I'm guessing it may be useful for some businesses emailing within a domain, but
this is surely not the majority of mozilla or even Netscape 6 users.  So I think
it should be dropped from the list with a pref to add it back in.

I remember the suggestion that the old autocomplete URL method from 4.x be
incorporated to the new one so the top match could be visited by just hitting
enter.  I'm not sure what came of that, but that type of behavior would seem to
be the solution here.  With one exact match for the nickname there could still
be a dropdown list as there currently is, but there would also be the 4.x
behavior for addressing where it fills in the matching name and email behind the
cursor.
Hence incorporating the 4.x "accept what I type" behavior and the new
convenience of the dropdown list.

Comment 10

[Caspy7]

I just noticed that the above behavior I just mentioned is already implimented
if there is only one match in your address book for what you have typed or if
there are no matches it will fill in the rest with your default domain.
You can test this by beginning a new message and typing in a name for which
there is only one match or typing a name for which there is no match.

Given this knowledge that the code is already in place to accomplish said
behavior, all that needs to happen is make it so an exact match for a nickname
will do the same thing.  So someone who knows the code could fairly easily
impliment this.  

And perhaps if there are multiple matches for a nickname it could give some sort
of message in italics about there being multiple nickname matches in the address
book.

Comment 11

[Dan Meek]

Unfortunately, Mark Sutherlin's last comment was not correct about the current 
behavior of Mozilla 0.9.3.  The current behavior upon Mozilla encountering a 
unique nickname is to offer a list of possible completions, starting with 
[e-mail].  This is explained previously in this bug.  If the user 
hits return, he gets [e-mail], even though that does not at all 
correspond to the unique email address associated with the unique nickname.  
This is not the desired behavior.

The desired behavior is that displayed by Netscape 4.xx.  Upon finding a unique 
nickname, the email address associated with that nickname is entered, when the 
user hits return.

Comment 12

[Dan Meek]

I think I may have misinterpreted Mark's latest comment.  I think he is saying 
the same thing I am about nickname completion--that 0.9.3 does not properly 
complete unique nicknames.

He is saying that you can type in a unique firstname/lastname combination, hit 
return, and have the correct address entered.  True.  But you cannot do the same 
thing with nicknames.  End of my confusion.

Comment 13

[Dan Meek]

Here is the real problem.  Say you have a nickname in the addressbook "lkw" and 
you have another nickname "lkwbb".  You enter "lkw" in the To: field and hit 
return.  What happens in  Netscape 4.xx is that the address associated with lkw 
is entered.  What happens in 0.9.3 is that the list pops up, with [e-mail] 
as the first choice.

The problem is that 0.9.3 does not allow the user to hit return and get the 
address uniquely associated with a unique nickname he has entered.  Instead, it 
lists all nicknames that start with what the user entered (regardless of what 
somes after "lkw") and offers at the default the address [e-mail].

Comment 14

[Iain Rae]

Hmm.. I appear to fall into the irrational user in a large organisation
described previously.:) I'm afraid I find the current 0.9.7 behaviour really
irritating and I'm losing track of the number of times I've nearly emailed J.
Random person instead of a local user (and it's come up a couple of times with
students), annoyingly I do find the autocompletion really useful at times so I'd
rather not just switch it off. 

I suspect this feature falls into  one of the categories where it's probably
best  not to try and be clever and just give the user a bunch of options to
monkey about with. So something like a checkbox somewhere in preferences to
toggle between defaulting to <user>@localdomain and <nick> would be appreciated
at least by the folks here.


NB I wouldn't be too dismissive of large organisations, we've got a 1000+
userbase some of whom have been fairly vocal in getting mozilla deployed. :)

Comment 15

[Dan Meek]

First, this appears to be fixed in 0.9.7.  Thanks!

Let's not go back to the old way.  I simply want the autocomplete feature to 
work logically.  If I have established a nickname for a specific email address 
and then type in the nickname in the "To" field, then I want that specific email 
address to be entered.  I do not want some other email address to be entered, 
such as the [e-mail], where domain.xxx is the domain of the sender.

If you want to send email to [e-mail], then in the Address Book make 
the nickname for [e-mail] = nickname.

Yes, an option would be good.  But if there is not to be an option, the default 
should be to indeed respect established nicknames instead of ignoring them.  Is 
is not possible for people in large organizations to establish nicknames for 
those to whom they wish to send email?  Is there a reason that their desire not 
to do so should cause my nicknames to "autocomplete" incorrectly?

Comment 16

[Iain Rae]

adding nicks
yup, thought of that...it doesn't work, I've defined a nick for cc
cc-at-laeg-demon-co-uk (home domain) but cc<cr> gives me ccp-at-somewhereelse
which is a collected addresses address so I'm guessing that either 
cc-at-laeg-demon-co-uk is filtered out or the collected addresses addressbook
has priority.

If it's the latter then people relying on nick<cr> are going to get clobbered as
well..... yup, looks like that's what's happening.


second problem is one of scale
[glory]iainr: ypcat passwd|wc -l
   2725

that's a lot of typing :) ok it can be scripted but since there doesn't seem to
be support for shared addressbooks you're into deployment problems, wasted disk
space etc. yes we can/will eventually use LDAP server(s) but then you've just
moved the problem to which is the default, one of the local addressbooks or one
of the ldap servers. 

In the longer term you're probably going to want to list the order that it scans
for matches all I'm asking for in the shorter term is a toggle between @domain
and addressbooks.

This may also be a culture clash of OS's out of interest what are you using? the
unix convention (such that there is) seems to be to use <tab> for autocompletion
rather than <cr>.

Comment 17

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Is there any reason this bug should still be open?  Dan Meek stated that it was 
fixed way back in Jan 2002 (comment 15).

I am not seeing the apparently buggy behavior described in comment 16, where an 
exact-match nickname is being superceded by a partial-match nickname in another 
(e.g. collected) addr-book. (Or, was that "ccp" a typo?)  

I see the local domain being used if <user><cr> is typed and <user> doesn't have 
any matches in the address book.  If there is a match, of any sort (e.g. 
partial-match of first-name in the collected addr book), that will superceded 
the <user>@domain. If this is considered a problem, there should be a new bug 
opened.  (xref bug 100207)

Comment 18

[Dan Meek]

Yes, this bug was fixed a long time ago.  My only complaint about autocompletion
of email addresses, based on nickname, is that now is it very slow, which is
probably a function of the size of the addressbooks it is scanning.  But, if I
type in a correct nickname and hit <enter>, indeed Mozilla now enters the
correct email address.  That is what I wanted.  Thanks.

I do not know if I am supposed to change the status of the bug to fixed, since I
first reported it.  I will leave the status change to the experts.

Comment 19

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Marking as "WorksForMe" since I don't know what patch, if any, was implemented 
to fix this bug.  (People with votes on this bug may wish to move them to 
another.)