User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; de-de) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; de; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100317 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.4 If you get an email with a From: address that's in your address book and is associated with a name there, and the From: name differs from the name in the address book, then the message list shows the actual From: name and the message pane for the message shows the name from the address book. This happens only when the option "Show only display name for people in my address book" is checked; otherwise the actual From: name is displayed in the message pane, along with the From: address. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Make sure the option "Show only display name for people in my address book" is checked. 2. Choose a message whose From: address is in your address book. 3. In the address book, temporarily change the display name associated with that address. Actual Results: In the message list, the From: column shows the actual name in the message's From: field. In the message pane for the message, the display name you entered in the address book is shown in the From: field. Expected Results: 1. The same From: names should be displayed in the message list and in the message pane. These are the same fields as far as the user is concerned. 2. In my opinion, the actual name in the message's From: name should take precedence and override the name in the address book. For instance, two people might be using the same email address, and the name is likely to be intentionally set to indicate which of them is writing. A directly related but less serious problem that could and should probably be fixed at the same time is that if the message's From: field contains only an address without a name, the From: field in the message list shows the address and not the associated name from the address book despite the option being set, i.e. it seems this option affects only the message pane but not the message list. As above, these two are the same field as far as the user is concerned, and the option should affect them both in the same way.

To summarize what I think needs to be done: 1. The behaviour of the From: field in the message pane should be changed so that it uses the actual name in the message's From: field, and only retrieves the name associated with the From: address from the address book if the From: field doesn't contain a name. 2. The behaviour of the From: field in the message list should be changed to do whatever the From: field in the message pane does.

I just came across bug 243631. I didn't read all of it, but from some of the early comments (e.g. 5 (item 3) and 9), it seems that some users prefer the display name to take precedence over the actual name in the From: field. Different goals are being pursued here -- they want to control how people's names are displayed (e.g. with prefixes for categorizing them) and to prevent people from impersonating someone else, whereas others might want to allow different names to be used with the same email address. Thus, there should probably be a preference like "display name overrides actual name in From: field" or so -- this could be right next to the "Show only display name for people in my address book" preference. I think these should then be independent of each other -- currently, the display name only overrides the actual name if "Show only display name for people in my address book" is checked, whereas I would presume that whether people want the display name to override the actual name is probably independent of whether they want *only* this name to be displayed or also want to see the email address.

(In reply to comment #2) > Thus, there should probably be a preference like "display name overrides > actual name in From: field" You're in luck, that's bug 474721, which has a patch (by me) and just needs a second review and a check-in. Note that the patch doesn't fix all cases, but it's the first step. There still needs to be a patch for the multi-message summaries (easy, bug 563062) and the message list (hard, bug 312821).

Oh, and there needs to be a patch for global search (I don't think that's been filed, though).