85655 - paste into TO: line ignores email addresses after a CR in compose window

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Composition, defect)

Description

[emmet]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.1+)
Gecko/20010608
BuildID:    2001060820

If I have a 'notepad' file containing this text (no spam please!)

[e-mail],
[e-mail],
[e-mail],
[e-mail]

and I (in windows!) Copy it to the clipboard and then call
up a new messge in Mozilla and click on the 'To:' line to
paste the addresses in I find that *only the first one*
is inserted and everything after the CR on the first line
is just ignored.

*Variant bug*

If I then chain all the email addresses together like

[e-mail],[e-mail],[e-mail],[e-mail]

and insert them into the 'To:' box they are inserted *as is*
rather than parsed as seperate addresses and inserted
into four 'To:' boxes.



Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Keyser Sose]

Confirmed
Platform: PC
OS: Windows 98
Mozilla Build: 2001072003

Marking NEW.

Comment 2

[hoecoop]

*** Bug 138461 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3

[hoecoop]

This needs keyword 4xp added.  Every other email program I have ever used,
including Netscape Messenger, had this functionality.  It still exists as of
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.0rc1) Gecko/20020417.

Comment 4

[Aaron Kaluszka]

*** Bug 112781 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Mike Baptiste]

This bug needs some more attention.  While it seems minor, as more people begin
to explore using Moz or NS for email again, this deficiency will be a major
problem for some.

We're having a LOT of trouble with Eudora as we move to 100% SSL IMAP and we
have a lot of Eudora users.  We've begun to convince many that the Mozilla
Mail/News client is just as good, faster, less likely to corrupt boxes, etc. 
They really like it, but almost ALL of the converted users bemoan the lack of an
easy way to paste in a list of email addresses and its always 'Well Eudora did
it, Outlook does, even NS 4" etc

I also belive this bug's scope need to be widened a bit.  In addition to the
Compose window To: fields, you shoudl be able to paste a list of email addresses
into the New Mailing List window of the address book.  I mean, nobody is going
to type in each individual address for a mailing list greater than 5 people or
so.  Cut and paste!

Beyond that, Netscape 4 even allowed you to drag and drop a selection of email
addresses onto teh Compose To: fields or the New Mailing list window.

This may seem like a minor bug, but you'd be surprised by the number of normal
client users who find this to be a showstopper or serious deficiency.

I know this isn't 'helpful' and I wish I was better versed in Mozilla coding,
but I just wanted to add some insight into the lack of a very common
functionality in most peer applications

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

Occurs at least on windows and linux: all/all

I would also suggest to raise severity to normal or major since
practically every current email program does have this.

Comment 7

[[e-mail]]

The same problem exists when trying to paste into a mailing list window.
There is also no way to import into a mailing list, so it is extremely
difficult to do this or work around it.
Important for many corporate users.

Comment 8

[Brant Gurganus]

By the definitions on <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/bug_status.html#severity> and
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=guided>, crashing and dataloss
bugs are of critical or possibly higher severity.  Only changing open bugs to
minimize unnecessary spam.  Keywords to trigger this would be crash, topcrash,
topcrash+, zt4newcrash, dataloss.

Comment 9

[Jim Booth]

*** Bug 189578 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Jim Booth]

*** Bug 206007 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Jim Booth]

*** Bug 166555 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[emmet]

Bug 227206 may have fixed this bug however testing pending fixing 229203

Comment 13

[Scott MacGregor]

taking. I have actually fixed this for thunderbird and it partially works for
Seamonkey. 

Seamonkey & thunderbird can now accept a comma delimited list of names all one
one line (typed in or pasted in from a document/spreadsheet/notepad/etc.) and
after you hit enter we will auto complete each name individually.

Thunderbird can also accept a selection of addresses from Excel where the names
are delimited by line returns (or cells) such as: 
Scott
David
Paul

See Bug #229203 about why this won't work in the suite yet.

I'm going to mark this fixed. The remaining seamonkey issue can be tracked in
229203.

Comment 14

[Max Spicer]

This bug is not fixed on linux (fedora 1 core) with Thunderbird 0.5.  If I use
vim to put write three email addresses, each on its own line, then copy and
paste the addresses into the "to" bar in t/b, only the last one is displayed. 
However, you can use the up and down arrows to display the others - the single
line "to" bar actually scrolls up and down.  Tabbing out of the line, pressing
enter or sending the message does nothing to expand the email addresses out onto
their own lines.  This is almost certainly due to linux's lf endings instead of
crlf.

Comment 15

[Scott MacGregor]

Here's the patch for the line issue:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=137854&action=view

I'm testing for CRLF which I'm guessing won't fly on linux :)

Comment 16

[Ryan Means]

This functionality is really important for Seamonkey. Comma-separated is an 
improvement, but users expect to be able to paste a multi-line list (CRLF, not 
just commas) into the recipient listbox and the mailing list listbox (both 
addressingWidgets). Could anyone up this bug's priority?

Comment 17

[Rob Janssen]

Is it considered too risky to put that CRLF patch in the code?
We really want to have this...
People keep lists of mail addresses in programs like Excel, copy a column out of
that, and want to send mail to these addresses.
Using Office and Outlook it is also possible (and better) to do this using form
letters, but that won't work with Mozilla because the MAPI32.DLL emulation is
not yet good enough.
I would really like to be able to suggest the alternative of pasting the
addresses, but I think it is difficult for the average Windows user to quickly
transform a CRLF-separated list into a comma-separated list...

Comment 18

[Murray Eisenberg]

This bug appears to have been fixed, at least for Thunderbird 1.0.2 under
Windows XP Professional (SP2):  I create a list of e-mail addresses in Notepad,
say, one per line.  I copy the entire document and paste into a To: field in
Thunderbird.  Initially, the entire list appears on the one line there with
commas separating the addresses.  But if I just press Enter, then the addresses
are automatically distributed one per line.

Comment 19

[Chris Thomas (CTho) [formerly [e-mail] [e-mail]]]

(In reply to comment #18)
> This bug appears to have been fixed, at least for Thunderbird 1.0.2 under
> Windows XP Professional (SP2):  I create a list of e-mail addresses in Notepad,
> say, one per line.  I copy the entire document and paste into a To: field in
> Thunderbird.  Initially, the entire list appears on the one line there with
> commas separating the addresses.  But if I just press Enter, then the addresses
> are automatically distributed one per line.

The same happens in suite.  That's far from ideal though.

Comment 20

[Karsten Düsterloh]

I'd say that the best thing to solve this issue here is a combination of Scott's
approach in bug 229203, combined with Jesse's comment there:
- Implement a textbox string attribute "linebreakreplace" that takes a string
all linebreaks pasted into that textbox should be replaced by
- Set this attribute to "," for all addressing widget textboxes

Comment 21

[Lyle Greg Lisle]

(In reply to comment #19)
> (In reply to comment #18)
> > This bug appears to have been fixed, at least for Thunderbird 1.0.2 under
> > Windows XP Professional (SP2):  I create a list of e-mail addresses in Notepad,
> > say, one per line.  I copy the entire document and paste into a To: field in
> > Thunderbird.  Initially, the entire list appears on the one line there with
> > commas separating the addresses.  But if I just press Enter, then the addresses
> > are automatically distributed one per line.
> 
> The same happens in suite.  That's far from ideal though.


I just tried this in v 1.7.8 and it doesn't work.  I guess I need to set up 1.8
and try that.

Comment 22

[Rob Janssen]

As some of our users need this, and there does not seem to be a Mozilla 1.8
forthcoming (what a pity...), I have written a small cgi-bin program on our
Intranet that puts up a big text field, where users can paste their addresses
from notepad or copied from their Excel column, POST the form, and it returns
with all the addresses comma-separated on a single line.
They then cut that and paste it in the To: field, which is then expanded to
individual lines when ENTER is pressed.

It is cumbersome, but at least it works.
Unfortunately this is not the only bug in 1.7.8 that is fixed in the trunk
version, but that will never be fixed for us because the powers that be have
decided that this trunk version will never be released as 1.8 :-(

Comment 23

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

seems pretty lame

Comment 24

[Lyle Greg Lisle]

Any idea when this will be fixed in Seamonkey?

Comment 25

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

the key is Bug 229203 comment 3 "seamonkey has other single line text box widgets which won't want this behavior" in nsTextEditRules.


Max comment #14
> not fixed on linux Thunderbird ... due to linux's lf endings instead of crlf.
comment #15
> [in] http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=137854&action=view
> I'm testing for CRLF which I'm guessing won't fly on linux :)

note the final patch for bug 229203 didn't fix linux (thunderbird), bug is marked windows only and is closed.  I don't see one opened for linux. You might open one for linux.


for some history see also bug 227206.
with TB already fixed, seems like this might be an OK firstbug.
dataloss => critical?

Comment 26

[Anthony Lanni]

(In reply to comment #19)
> (In reply to comment #18)
> > This bug appears to have been fixed, at least for Thunderbird 1.0.2 under
> > Windows XP Professional (SP2):  I create a list of e-mail addresses in Notepad,
> > say, one per line.  I copy the entire document and paste into a To: field in
> > Thunderbird.  Initially, the entire list appears on the one line there with
> > commas separating the addresses.  But if I just press Enter, then the addresses
> > are automatically distributed one per line.
> 
> The same happens in suite.  That's far from ideal though.

Works this way in T-Bird 1.5.0.5 on linux.  That behavior is acceptable AFAIC.

Comment 27

[Lyle Greg Lisle]

Still not working on Seamonkey after 5 years.

Comment 28

[Andy Boze]

(In reply to comment #27)
> Still not working on Seamonkey after 5 years.
> 
It's working for me, at least the conversion of newlines to commas. See bug 229203. Set the preference "editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines" to the value "4". I'm using SM 1.5a.

Comment 29

[Karsten Düsterloh]

This is WFM under Linux, because editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines is 0 (paste newlines intact) here. The default for everyone else is 1 (paste up to the first newline), Thunderbird uses 4 (replace with commas).

We surely can't take TB's value, since this would break pasting in all our singleline textboxes (thus removing dependency).

Actually, I think that the paste behaviour should be handled by an attribute of the textbox/textarea, not by a global pref.
(This might mean fixing <http://mxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/editor/libeditor/text/nsPlaintextEditor.cpp#129> etc.)

Comment 30

[:Hb]

The WFM under Linux is questionable.  With editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines = 0 users see only the last one of the three addresses pasted into the address area.  The solution for addressingWidget.js from bug 227206 does not fire just after pasting.  The addresses are only separated after a keystroke or after clicking Send Message or Edit Draft.

In general SM should replace Newlines with a Whitespace character.  I filed bug 533285 for this.

In the address area Newlines should be replaced by Comma as in Thunderbird.  This would allow to paste Newline delimited and Comma delimited address lists directly.  Even lists delimited by Newline+Comma would work, because the newly generated but superfluous commas are thrown away by addressingWidget.js.

Comment 31

[Philip Chee]

We can now use <textbox newlines="replacewithcommas" ...>
See:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XUL/Attribute/newlines

Comment 32

[Edmund Wong (:ewong)]

Attachment: Changed CR to commas.

Comment 33

[Philip Chee]

Pushed to comm-central:
http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/f3b2f4fad589
Pushed to comm-20:
http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-2.0/rev/0a9a6fbc0dd5