Currently the Mail alert slide up thingy shows the login name for the account that has new mail. This should show the name of that account instead, because for many people the loginname is just a weird bunch of characters or in my case numbers that mean nothing.

Based on the specs, it is intended to use the username of the account. The other alternative was to use the entire email address. I don't believe we will change this. Marking this as enhancement and adding RFE to subj line ccing jglick. Jennifer?Scott I'll let you decide whether we we want to mark this as won't fix or new.

reassigning to mscott and takig seth off list

In my case my account name is: "Student mail" and the corresponding username is: "s9807543" I'd say the first option sound much better. This is also the name that was chosen by the user, which is also to it's advantage in my opinion... Was this never considered? Or was the username valued above this option?

Confirming. User's choice is always a good point. Especially if you have lots of similar accounts.

Both Account Name and User Name were considered. The default name used for "Account Name" is the email address (may folks don't change the default). The reason User Name was initially picked was because it is in most cases shorter than User Name and horizontal space is an issue. You can see samples here: http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/specs/mailnotify/#Alert. This is still subject to change if necessary.

Can't you then just show the first 250 pixels of the mail address? (eg "j.houwing@studen..." has new mail. That way at least something familiar to the user get's shown. The same could apply to the account name, which would then be the most logical choice. One more thing on this, if it was chosen to save space, why is it then that if two mail alerts are shown at the same time (or some time ago even three in my case) they get shown side by side? That way even the short username is way too long. But this is probably an other bug.

I agree with the idea to show the account name instead of the user name for this reasons : - You can put the account name you want. It's not true with the username. - You can truncate to XX character the account name, like that the user can adjust the account name if he wants. - The account name is more easy to understand in the little new message box when you have more than one mail account in your mozilla (I have 4 account POP and IMAP).

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The account name shouldn't be too long either, because it is shown in the mailnews folder pane in bold case. With the current with of my folder pane there isn't room for much more than 10-15 characters. Also, it is not unlikely that a user has several mail accounts with the same username (e.g. their first name). Or that a user has several usernames that consist of "random" characters (like "mbx10432"). (The latter is in fact the reason that I am annoyed by the current behaviour.)

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As far as usability and end-user comfort goes, I agree completely with the comments here that the notification should not be the user name, but the account name. Some of the alternate designed at the above-posted http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/specs/mailnotify/#Alert link would seem to take greater advantage of screen space, particularly #5, which takes advantage of not only a smaller, cleaner looking font, but a more 'vertical' usage by double stacking. It could be double stacked if the account name is too long: someone@somelongser... has 1 new messages Or for a shorter server: someone@shortserver.com has 2 new messages

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If the spec claims that because of space issues it's better to display "047859 has 1 new message" instead of "joe@sixpack.net has 1 new message" then that does not seem like a good trade-off to me.

why not do: silly@example.com has 1 new message -- that way the number of messages is flush left. yes it wastes more vertical space, but who cares?

In my case, I have the same username on two different mail accounts, so the information in the alert is ambiguous. If bug 145982 is ever addressed, the alert could be even more confusing.

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rising attention

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It seems that there's a workaround: I did create a new account but as I didn't remember the username I wrote my name, and when I finished filling the data I checked the proper username and fixed it in the account settings. The nice side is that new whenever I get mail in that account the alert pops up with my name (instead of the username like the rest of my accounts do). So I checked prefs.js and saw these lines: user_pref("mail.server.server9.name", "the name that I wrote"); user_pref("mail.server.server9.realuserName", "the username"); I tested creating a realuserName entry for the other acounts and then the alert shows .name while the username shown in the Mail&news account settings is realuserName (and the one used to login with the server). So until someone tells me that something is wrong about this and I'm killing someone on the otherside of the world everytime my notification pops up with a meaningful name in them, I will think about this as another hidden feature that no one did notice.

I've tried the above workaround with limited success. Alfonso Martinez, could you be a little more specific as to what values you used for those preferences? Also, are you using POP or IMAP mail? I believe you meant that rather than "mail.server.serverX.name", the preference that should be tweaked is "mail.server.serverX.userName" -- this in addition to adding "mail.server.serverX.realUserName". However, I don't see any evidence that the realUserName preference is used, in my POP accounts. What I did, that seemed to work for some accounts, is change the "userName" pref (e.g.) from "mcow" to "mcow@well" -- the new value being how I wanted the account to appear in the notification. I added a "realUserName" pref for the account, set to "mcow". This worked for the Well and one other account, but not for a third. I created a POP3 log to check what was going on. For the Well mail server, the POP login string went out as: SEND: USER mcow@well instead of SEND: USER mcow Apparently the POP software simply strips off the @xxxx portion of a login name; authentication worked fine. If I use some random string in "userName", login fails. A different account with the same changes to the preferences doesn't use the plaintext authorization, but instead uses some secure login (NTLM, CRAM-MD5 or SCRAM-MD5, I'm not sure which). This account fails if the user name isn't precisely the user name. An additional drawback to the workaround is that the Password dialog displays the account name as "mcow@well@well.com".

Maybe I did some mistake in my previous post, so I'll try again: I'm using IMAP with the 2003 10 28 04 nigthly in wXP, no encryption or security settings of any kind sending or getting mesages. looking at the prefs.js before I made the change I see that this is the name that it's showing in the popup: user_pref("mail.server.server9.userName", "alfonso"); that was the user name that I wrote at first when I created the account, then after closing the wizard I went to the account settings and wrote the right username (a mess of letters and numbers like isG349c for example) I can see that this data is stored in this preference: user_pref("mail.server.server9.realuserName", "isG349c"); so I changed the .userName preference with the email address and now that is what I get when the alert popups. I changed another account creating the realuserName entry with the user for that account and putting the email in the .userName and that one seems to work fine too. I missed a bit: after starting Mozilla it the asked me for the password for both accounts, but I don't remember if it was in a proper way or it had two @ as Mike Cowperthwaite has pointed out. So if this works only for me then I'm sorry, I just tried to share this tip with everyone else that is frustated as I was because the notification was almost useless for me having several accounts and I can't remember which string of numbers and letters applies to each account.

Actually, Alfonso, the mistake is mine: I used the wrong preference name: "realUserName" instead of "realuserName" the difference being the case of the 'U' character. I discovered this by trying exactly the steps you outlined; I then saw that the account had one preference set with each name. After correcting, Mozilla uses the preference exactly as you described originally. Yay!

I've discovered an apparent bug with the preferences-hack described above: apparently the folder preferences in Account Settings|Copies&Folders are keyed to the 'userName' preference: the Sent, Drafts and Templates folders are all specified using the exact text of 'userName'. For instance: user_pref("mail.identity.id1.fcc_folder", "mailbox://mcow@mail.well.com/Sent"); In my case, I noticed this because I went looking for mail I'd sent and couldn't find it -- it wasn't saved due to this glitch. So, I've backed out the change and am using only 'userName' again.

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verified dup