GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 731647
Name shortening in conversations
Last modified: 2019-01-15 06:40:25 UTC
Hi, by default geary shortens the names of recipients like gmail. If have a conversation with John Doe geary will show a conversation with "me" and "John". That's really annoying when I do e.g. a conversation with my professor. Geary will show me something like "me, Matthias". My suggestion: Use the last name instead of the first name. Maybe add the first letter of the first name. --> "me, J. Doe".
I'm not sure I understand the motivation behind your problem. Is it that you think your professor should be identified by his family name out of respect for his position? Last name only opens up other problems. For example, if I'm in a conversation with my relatives, I'll see "Me, Nelson, Nelson". "Me, D. Nelson, A. Nelson" isn't a whole lot better, especially if my family has first names with the same first letter.
> I'm not sure I understand the motivation behind your problem. Is it that you > think your professor should be identified by his family name out of respect for > his position? No. It is just the fact that the probability of similar first names might be higher than the other way round. In my addressbook there are at least two "Wolfgang", five "Stefan", three "Martin" and so on. So I think that any additional info here would be useful.
It seems to me that this would be best handled by having a nickname field in the address book. Then you can decide whether Mr. Firstname Lastname should show up as Firstname, Lastname, F. Lastname, Firstname L., Cuddlebunkins, etc. Geary doesn't have an address book per se, so we can't do this. I think it is supposed to interact with your system address book, though. Do these offer nicknames we could grab and use?
Today, Geary's contacts are harvested from the emails it downloads. We do want to offer a contact manager of some sort (bug #714696) and we do want to start using external sources for contact information (bug #714160). A nickname field might help. I'd be curious if EDS and Gmail offers nicknames in their contact managers. If Gmail does, I'd then be curious if it uses them in its participants' list.
I see that Geary does not shorten the name if the conversation has a single message. It does it when there's more *than one message*. I don't think it's a sensible choice: it should shorten it if there are *several participants* in the coonversation (say, at least 3 or 4). The shortening makes sense when there are multiple participants and the conversation list cannot contain all names/surnames. I have currently a 9 message thread with two participants (myself and another one), where the other one is displayed as Name, even if there would be plenty of space for Name Surname. Gmail behaves just the same as Geary: Name+Surname for single message conversation, only Name for multiple message conversation.. Gmail contacts does not have a nickname field. It has the following fields: Title, Name, Second Name, Surname, Suffix. Name is what is shown the conversation list for multiple message conversations.
We could probably add tooltips with full names, too.
Resolving as obsolete all bugs that should be resolved by the conversation list redesign (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=730682). I'd mark them as a duplicate, but bz won't let me :( Apologies for the noise.