To me, it seems odd that the enter and tab keys could have different autocomplete behaviors. But also to me, the entire autocomplete implementation seems odd as relates to email addresses. After posting a duplicate bug, 1239818, on this issue and reading the feedback on that and another related bug, 1012397, I was motivated to try and understand the historical progression. First, I tried to parallel install Thunderbird 24.x, but had too much trouble with it undesirably using my 31.x profile. So then I thought I'd try MS Outlook, which is what I used before moving to Thunderbird some years ago. It turns out that Outlook is where my expectations appear to originate. In Outlook, nicknames, display names, and full email addresses are interchangeable on the same address line. So one can just natually type a sequence of nicknames separated by semicolons in a single recipient list. The translation from nickname or display name to actual email address is done somewhere in the background. After some further rumination, I also seem to remember that this automagical translation of nicknames to addresses also was a feature of the original "mail" command line client. I mean, what is the purpose of a nickname if you can't type a sequence of them separated by semicolons into a recipient list? Doing some sort of fancy lookup spanning every bit of data on the hard drive just doesn't seem appropriate for email addresses. Keep it simple, limit it to nicknames and perhaps display names, and make it easier to just cut and paste from the address book for infrequently used addresses. It seems that recent changes are directed toward easing Thunderbird's use on phones or tablets. That in of itself, isn't a ridiculous idea, but it shouldn't ruin the experience on a conventional machine. One UI can't be made optimal for all machine form factors as should be pretty obvious from Microsoft's one Windows everywhere campaign. Let's not have one Thunderbird everywhere.

After looking at bug 1192739 I'm convinced there is a bit of a disconnect between the complainers, including me, and the implementors. I'd like to offer another example that I hope is particularly illustrative. Let's say that I want to send a message to my Mom, Dad and sisters. I click on the Thunderbird "Write" button and start typing: Mom, Dad, Barbara, Sarah <Tab>. What I get is the string "Mom, Dad, Barbara, Sarah" in the To: field and the cursor in a second magically appearing To: field, when what I want is for the cursor to advance to the the Subject: field and for the four Nicknames/Aliases that I entered to be expanded so that Thunderbird won't complain that "Mom, Dad, Barbara, Sarah" is not a valid email address when I later attempt to actually send the message. It would be preferrable, at least to me, if the aliased addresses were expanded on a single To: line, but I could live with three magically appearing To: lines in addition to the first and the four completed addresses distributed into the four To: lines. I want to emphasize, that this is NOT a timing/performance issue, in that I can wait as long as I like between typing each character in the above described To: line and I still get the same undesirable behavior. Basically what I'm looking for is what I could do back in 1985 just using the original "mail" user agent and alias commands in my ~/.mailrc file.

Speaking solely for myself, who learned to type on an actual typewriter, not looking at the typewriter or screen but usually some piece of paper, it's somewhat annoying to be told that I can't easily get into a situation that I easily get into all the time. Also speaking solely for myself, it seems odd that a feature that was in unix mail circa 1985, that I personally remember was in the original Netscape email client circa 1995, and by extension was likely in original versions of Thunderbird, was in Outlook Express, and is in Microsoft Outlook, is no longer working in recent Thunderbird versions. It seems that a lot of people really like this new scheme of automagically creating a new To: line for each recipient, but I personally find it very inefficient and annoying. A bug actually. I've said this a number of times but I'll say it again, autocomplete is/should mostly be interesting to novices and touchscreen users. It should not interfere with touch typists. Right now it is grossly interfering with touch typists.

OK, I've done some study and agree that this bug is about autocompletion timing. The timing issue was introduced in Thunderbird 31x and other than the timing problem no other obvious changes, at least to me, were made to the message address fields from version 24x. But, I was still interested in the Thunderbird history of address lists. It turns out that Thunderbird version 2.0.0.24 was the last version to reasonably support comma separated addresses. So the current behavior can be considered to be a regression, but given the time to notice, only sort of. Anyway, the 2.0 behavior is that a comma separated list of addresses typed into a To: field is automagically distributed to the proper number of separate To: fields, each autocompleted upon entry termination in the first field via <Tab> or <Enter>. Starting in version 3.x, the automagical distribution remains, but autocompletion of each separate field does not occur. The recent behavior is that a comma separated list of addresses is neither distributed to separate fields or autocompleted upon <TAB> or <ENTER>, but a comma in the To: field causes a new blank To: field to be created. I'm not exactly sure when the version 3x behavior was lost, but sometime after version 10x. After looking at the history, I was wondering why it took so long, at least a couple of years, for me to notice that a comma separated list of addresses is not supported in Thunderbird. I'm thinking now, that I did notice, but just stopped using comma separated address lists when I started using Thunderbird. That got me thinking about the history of my emailing from home. I started using Thunderbird sometime between 2-5 years ago when I switched from Microsoft IE to Firefox, switching at the same time from Outlook to Thunderbird. Before that I had been using IE and Outlook 2000 since, yes, 2000. Before that IE and Outlook Express since about 1998 when I switched from Netscape Communicator in the version 4 debacle. Before that, yes, Netscape Communicator since about 1995 and before that unix mail on a Netcom shell account since about 1991. Anyway, the upshot is that up until Thunderbird, every other email client that I've ever used supported comma or semicolon separated address lists. It turns out that Thunderbird originally supported this as well and lost that ability in the transition from version 2 to 3. Noticeable vestiges of support remained until around version 17 but currently only barely noticeable vestiges remain. All interesting.

Interesting, but not relevant. Please keep bug reports focused on the bug they're reporting. Thanks~

Well I disagree that my comments are irrelevant. In particular, if Thunderbird had not lost the ability to correctly process recipient lists, this current bug report would not be present.

(In reply to Paul Ausbeck from comment #7) > ... > > It seems that recent changes are directed toward easing Thunderbird's use on > phones or tablets. That in of itself, isn't a ridiculous idea, but it > shouldn't ruin the experience on a conventional machine. One UI can't be > made optimal for all machine form factors as should be pretty obvious from > Microsoft's one Windows everywhere campaign. Let's not have one Thunderbird > everywhere. THis is just speculation and there is no truth in it. And this bug has nothing to do with multiple addresses on a single line, comma separated or otherwise. Please take these comments somewhere else.

Hmmm, insults followed by false politeness. I must have touched a nerve here somewhere.

Martin, thank you for the carefully crafted response. FYI, I'm not directly expecting to get comma delimited lists working again via this bug report, especially now that I've discovered that it hasn't been working since version 2.x. But I do think that my comments should be interesting and useful to the maintainers. Perhaps at some future point, someone will gain enough confidence in the code to tackle the comma delimited issue without an actual bug report. It's definitely a regression and should be fixed as it's a useful feature. Also, it seems likely that basic timely completion will not be really fixed until a proper completion infrastructure has been restored. I agree that the delayed/failed completion issue is more important than comma delimited completion. After all, I was able to work around the comma delimiter failure by just not using delimiters. But this failed/slow completion is devilishly difficult to work around. Even after 100's of failures, I still occasionally forget to look at the screen for a successful completion before pressing the Tab key, and only find out after I've composed the message and attempt to send. However, I still puzzled as to how comma delimited completion got lost in the first place. Certainly, many people must have been using it, so it seems that I'm not alone in just silently adapting.

After sleeping on this I searched for and found bug 392932, the oldest report of problems with comma delimited lists that I could easily find, and linked it to this one via comment. I've included the last paragraph of my comment there, here: "One last item of note is that it seems from the age of this regression that Thunderbird is not being as actively maintained as I had thought. My mental model was that as an official Mozilla project, Thunderbird would have at least several semi-professional/expert-amateur maintainers. My feeling now is that that is not the case and perhaps Thunderbird maintenance is now largely up to the coding-skilled portion of the user base. Sort of the "if I want this fixed, I'll do it myself mentality". So is that the case, does Thunderbird welcome user generated patches?" Wow, I just noticed that my previous comment was "hidden" as off-topic. Likely that this one will suffer the same fate. Things just get curioser and curioser...

(In reply to Paul Ausbeck from comment #24) >. So is that the case, does > Thunderbird welcome user generated patches?" Yes of course! Thunderbird is actively maintained by the community, with Mozilla providing the infrastructure.

Well I have some inclination to contribute to Thunderbird as I do use it. Also, I may have more time to devote to quixotic tasks than average. But I'm not convinced just how welcome any efforts may actually be, exclamation points aside. Given that if I were to look at this problem, it would be in the context of bug 392932, I was wondering if whomever hid my previous comments as off-topic may reconsider his/her action. Just in isolation, it seems absurd to hide comments but then leave responses to them unhidden.

The response included additional information relevant to this bug, that's why it wasn't hidden. Now please stop speculating on this bug. If you have comments about comma-separation, post them in *that* bug. One bug per report, please. Crossing topics clutters the report and makes it harder for everyone else to figure out what's going on.

Disagreement with a single person is one thing, disagreement with an entire community, quite another. I find the trickiest part of life is deciding on when to flush past effort as wasted. The metric I use is whether or not something can be learned from further effort. For instance with this post I can turn passive agreement into active. Isn't there just one person out there with an inclination towards my point of view? You must be quick or determined, a tree fallen in silence is hushed forever.