User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; rv:5.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0.1 Build ID: 20110707182747 Steps to reproduce: Look at list in Folder Actual results: All bugzilla mails - in the "From" field of the list - say Bugzilla (for Deepak Agarwal) All, I repeat all, Bugz messages have that same name -- including all old bugz emails from months ago, and all new emails. They used to have different names. Expected results: Bugzilla (for John Doe) is actually in the header -- this should show in the list, too. (I look at the header by doing "Forward".) (I think this is a regression in 5.0)

Did you have an extension that did this? Mozilla bugzilla e-mail doesn't have anything special for the From field other than the bugzilla daemon address.

We (Yahoo) probably have lots of extensions. (I have asked the internal maintainers to look into it.) Still, if the Header has one name (a valid name), why the consistently bogus one in the List? (There are 3 Deepak Agarwals in the company; none sound like they are involved in Bugz.)

Does going into preferences, advanced, reading & display tab, and unchecking "show only display names..." fix it? If so, this is a dup.

Grrr... It was ThunderBird's Address book deciding that all emails from bugs@... should be labeled as coming from that one person. I cleared the flag in the address book, and all is well, even old emails. You could either close this bug report, or ponder whether the Address book is too aggressive. Re Comment 3 : I don't know. The Address book was a good fix for me.

I'm going to mark this incomplete, because I don't know how the display name got set incorrectly in the address book. And you can always turn off the option to use display name. Roughly speaking, there are two sorts of people - those who want control over the display name, and want to see that in the message area and message list, and the other people who don't want that, and we have a pref with UI to control that.

(In reply to comment #5) > I'm going to mark this incomplete, because I don't know how the display name > got set incorrectly in the address book. Contacts from previous versions of Thunderbird will default to showing the display name from the address book, since there's no way to tell what the user wants for those contacts, and that's how the message header has shown display names since 3.0 at least.

It's unfortunate that this is causing confusion - see the duplicate - but I'm sure if the behavior were the other way around (i.e. always prefer the header name), I'm sure there'd be reports about Thunderbird not respecting the user's settings. Maybe this needs to be documented in some prominent place; where's the best spot for that?

Here's a quick explanation of what's going on to make it easier to add a relnote for this: In bug 474721, we added the ability for the message pane to prefer the message header display name; when I did this, I set contacts to default to preferring the address book display name, since that's how 3.x worked. In bug 243631, we added the ability for the message pane to use the address book display name; the behavior for this is the same as the message header, except that the thread pane doesn't use the "You" shorthand that the message pane does. As a result, in 5.0, address book entries from previous versions will always use the display name from the address book, everywhere. In previous versions, they'd show the address book name in the message pane, but the message header name in the thread pane. To switch to preferring the message header display name, you need to edit the contact and deselect "Always prefer display name over message header". Finally, it's possible to customize how the display name works in the message pane by overriding the Javascript function FormatDisplayName. That doesn't work for the thread pane though, since it's a different function, but I believe it's possible to override in a different way.

> In bug 243631, we added the ability for the message pane to use the address book display This should be "the thread pane", not "the message pane".

I'm confirming this, since it's a fairly common issue, though the "fix" here is really just improving our documentation. Until that happens, here's a quick summary of how to fix this issue if you encounter it. There are two ways to do it: 1) Use the display name from the message header for everyone Go to Tools -> Options (or Edit -> Preferences), then go to Advanced -> Reading & Display and uncheck "Show only display name for people in my address book". 2) Use the display name from the message header for certain contacts In the message pane, click on the star next to the contact you want to modify, then click "Edit Details" and uncheck "Always prefer display name over message header".

Doesn't sound like we need to relnote this?

Maybe relnote is the wrong word, but I think there should be some sort of info on this in an easy-to-find place where people would go when asking for support (I'm not really sure where this would be).

Roland, Jen, can we make sure we've got something on sumomo for this please?

assigned this to jen to document on SuMoMo

I've created a new article to explain this: https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/display-name-message-list-and-message-pane. I've also added the issue to the "New in Thunderbird 5" page. Jim, would you please read the article over and confirm that it is correct?

I believe this paragraph is inaccurate: "However, in the message display, the name specified in the message header is always displayed, which means that the display name in the message display may be different from the name in the message list." The display name should always be the same in the message list and message display, except when the contact in question is one of your identities (then the display name is "You"). If the contact isn't in your address book, the message display will additionally show the email address. Here's a summary of the behavior. Assume we get an email from "Bob <bob@example.com>": Old way (3.x) ============= Not in address book: Message list: Bob Message display: Bob <bob@example.com> In address book as Robert: Message list: Bob Message display: Robert In address book as Robert, "Show only display name for people in my address book" unchecked: Message list: Bob Message display: Bob <bob@example.com> New Way (5.0) ============= Not in address book: Message list: Bob Message display: Bob <bob@example.com> In address book as Robert, "Always prefer display name over message header" checked: Message list: Robert Message display: Robert In address book as Robert, "Always prefer display name over message header" unchecked: Message list: Bob Message display: Bob In address book as Robert, "Show only display name for people in my address book" unchecked: Message list: Bob Message display: Bob <bob@example.com>

yeah, the bug fix that caused the need for this article was to make the message list display the same information as the message display, i.e., both now use the display name if the user has that pref set (previously, only the message display used the display name).

Bug 669925 reported similar issue(same?) in "non-ascii in mail address" case. xref that bug for ase of tracking and search.

Removing relnote keyword from bugs that are no longer significant or not needing to be mentioned in the release notes.

matt or tonnes, can you finish this off? See comment 20, et al

have done a first draft of the article changes, the result is I have deleted most of it. However I think we can close this bug.

excllent, thanks