GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 231751
Single line textfield for to/cc/bcc is limiting
Last modified: 2021-05-19 11:32:24 UTC
Probably one of the biggest annoyances I have with Evo in daily use is the limitation of only having a single line textfield for each of the To, Cc, and Bcc lines. It makes compiling, checking and editing anything but the most trivial distribution lists a chore. (Especially on Solaris, where the horizontal scrolling in the textfield is *REAALLY* slooowww...) I appreciate you might not want to go the Mozilla way and have one line for each recipient (although in the NS4.x days this actually worked pretty well... it's got rather ugly in NS6 though). But even if the fields were just made into combo boxes that you could drop-down to show the complete list of current recipients it would be a big improvement. Being able to add/remove recipients from the dropdown part would be absolutely perfect, though :)
Calum: I agree that the problem you reported sounds annoying. We have a few mechanisms in place to combat this-- could you let me know if either of these helps you? 1. If you press the "To" button (or the cc/bcc buttons), then a tool should appear to let you select recipients from you various addressbooks. Does this tool help your problem? (We call it the "select names dialog" in the development team.) 2. You can also create, store and edit distribution lists using the Contact List Editor. If you start the addressbook, and select New->Contact List, a dialog will appear to help you do this. Contact lists are presented like contacts to you in the UI, and are simple to view/change/whatever. Does this help your problem at all? It is okay if you don't think these mechanisms help your case. I am just trying to understand how you are using Evolution, so I can understand how to help you. Also, the solution you mention above scares me a bit because it seems that editing within a dropdown would be a very nonstandard (hence, possibly confusing, hard to learn, generally not positive for the interface as a whole) use of it. What do you think about this? Do I misunderstand what you suggest? -Anna
Contact lists aren't really the solution, at least not in my case. In a corporate environment, there are already company mail aliases for most project-related groups of people you need to send emails to, so contact lists are generally redundant. So the problem I'm talking about only really hits with one-off emails you send/receive addressed to a particular bunch of people. The most common scenario is that I receive an email that was addressed to 20 people, say, and I only want to respond to maybe five or six of them because it won't be relevant to the others. Right now that's a chore because: - I can only see two or three names in the To: field at a time. - I can't quickly select a recipient's entire name/address for deletion in the To/Cc/Bcc fields just by double-clicking on it like I can in outlook or netscape... instead double-clicking pops up a Contact Editor for that person, which is the last thing I need, especially as they're probably already in my addressbook anyway! Another common scenario is that, having composed such a mail, I want to do a quick visual check to see that I haven't missed anyone off the list, preferably without having to open another window just to do so :) This is where the dropdown could be handy, even if it wasn't editable (and I share your concerns there, although there are probably ways to make it work without being too unconventional). In theory, the Select Names dialog could do everything I need, yes, albeit with the inconvenience of having to open another window. There are a couple of problems with it that make it pretty annoying to use at the moment, though: - there's no easy/obvious way to remove names from the To/Cc/Bcc lists. After a while I discovered that you can select them and press Delete, but again, you can't even just click or double-click a person's name to select it for removal, it just pops up the Contact Editor. (Why aren't the To/Cc/Bcc lists just regular list controls with one item for each person you add, rather than being free text entry fields?) - the keyboard navigation in this dialog is fairly poor, you have to physically click on the "To", "Cc" or "Bcc" buttons to add recipients, or Tab your way to the relevant button, then back again to add more recipients etc.... At the very least, mnemonics are needed here on the To/Cc/Bcc buttons. - the lists on the right are unusably small by default, in both directions, but especially horizontally. Additionally, when you resize the dialog horizontally, it really only needs to resize those right-hand lists as the left-hand list is already plenty wide enough, but instead it resizes all of them. Thus you have to make the dialog way wider than necessary just to make the left and right lists approximately the same width... which they logically should be to start with, since they potentially contain exactly the same information. I think the underlying issue is that from the moment I open my Compose window, I'm in "typing an email" mode and don't really want to have to use my mouse or open any other windows until I hit that "Send" button :)
hi calum, i'll update the report, feel free to add comments. :-) [can only see two or three names]: still right. any suggestions? :-) [can't quickly select by double-clicking] as described in bug 260851 and bug 216073 double-clicking now (2.1.4) highlights the word, choosing rightclick menu's first item brings up the contact editor. it *does* make sense, see named bugs for reasons. [keyboard navigation fairly poor] mnemonics were added and exist in 2.1.4. [the lists on the right are unusably small by default] old bug, already fixed.
Apologies for any spam... cc'ing usability-maint on all Evolution usability bugs. Filter on EVO-USABILITY-SPAM to ignore.
*** Bug 236992 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I guess we should show the emails in the TO/CC/? entries in a way how the autocomplete stuffs are displayed with scroll bar. Support to edit on r-click, multi select to delete etc and when collapsed, just display them serially with seperated by commas or so.
Having a single text field is a problem, if we want to show names and emails instead of just names, on autocompletion. See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=272391
Bumping version to a stable release.
*** Bug 253112 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(Quoting a recent mail to evo-hackers, for posterity:) Fixing some of the brokenness of the To/Cc/Bcc headers in the composer would be wonderful. Try this in the current composer: 1. Paste or enter this address into the To: header, exactly as follows: Woodhouse, David <David.Woodhouse@intel.com> 2. Click somewhere *outside* the To: header entry box. 3. "Realise" that the name is stupidly backwards and contains a stupid comma that shouldn't be in an RFC5322 display-name. (Yay Exchange) 4. Go back to the To: header entry, and put quotes around the display-name so it looks like "Woodhouse, David" <David.Woodhouse@intel.com> 5. Click somewhere outside the entry, again. 6. Watch the address magically transform itself to nonsense: "Woodhouse, David" <David.woodhouse@intel.com>, David <David.woodhouse@intel.com> In the past when our message *display* also gratuitously screwed with display-names to *remove* the quotes which were necessary to make them correct, this used to happen quite a lot when addresses were cut and pasted. We should also be able to send a mail with the following headers: To: Some people I want to invite to my party : ; Bcc: foo@bar.com Currently I get an SMTP error when I try that, because it treats the group in the To: header as a single address, and submits it in RCPT TO:<Some people... party : ;>
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