Thunderbird email address display

[Peter Flynn]

On 05/10/2023 09:42, Karl Auer wrote:
> On Thu, 2023-10-05 at 16:13 +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
>> So, the Supernova malware makes Thunderbird v115 malware.
>> [...]
>> Luckily, I did not naively downgrade [...] to the malware edition
>> [...]
>> It is unfortunate that due to the malignants responsible
> 
> While I understand your frustration, Supernova really isn't malware, 
> the authors are not "malignants", and Thunderbird itself is not 
> malware.

Probably not, but what would worry me is that the authors or
maintainers of Tbird even considered doing this in the first place.

PCMag wrote, 'what a blog post calls “a modernized overhaul of the 
software—both visually and technically”' which are words that should 
worry every user. I don't know the Tbird team's consultation methods, 
but I am surprised it failed to throw up this as a poor choice.

> It's just software that has lost a feature you valued

I would expect it to be valued by most users, although I don't know the 
percentage of users (new and old) who don't place any particular value 
on actual email addresses and therefore believe they don't want to see 
them. I know that N is large overall because I used to have them in 
training courses, delighted to see only the user-friendly name, not the 
address; but that was on a different system.

> I guess you are exaggerating for effect, but it makes you look a bit
> silly. 

I disagree. The principle of "if it ain't bust, don't fix it" has been 
ignored; but Tbird may believe that it *was* bust. I don't think drawing 
attention to this is silly; and these things do sometimes need 
exaggeration to be recognised as serious.

> It's unlikely to move anyone to want to help you - least of all the
> Thunderbird maintainers who are the only people likely to be able to.
> You might get more traction with a friendly bug report (and maybe a 
> donation)...

Bug reports to Mozilla are largely a waste of time, even if you can find 
somewhere to submit them. I gave up long ago when I found out that 
no-one could use bugzilla because it just went round in circles (login, 
submit, script error, time-out back to login; this persisted for over a 
year). Perhaps it has changed, but the numerous and longstanding (if 
minor) bugs in Tbird have remained unfixed for so long that I have lost 
my faith in their willingness to listen.
> Personally I like the idea of having an option to display addresses 
> instead of display names, an option to display addresses as well as 
> display names, and an optional hover behaviour that reveals the
> address underlying a display name.

All of the above. Perhaps I have misunderstood the features of 115.

I think the OP's complaint was that the *default* behaviour was to hide 
addresses, and that this was a poor choice.

Peter