Training TB to choose "right" addressee

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charscot
Posts: 225
Joined: August 14th, 2006, 4:38 pm
Location: London, UK

Training TB to choose "right" addressee

Post by charscot »

After upgrading to 102 (now 102.1.2) after not upgrading for some years I found that TB was no longer "smart" when it came to choosing which e-mail addressee I was wanting when I started typing an addressee's name in the "To" section of an outgoing e-mail.

I assumed it would "re-learn" my preferences over time but after a few weeks I have seen zero change in it's behaviour and it is still using the exact same names and is not proving at all helpful in this regard.

To give examples (as I am sure the above is vague) I have certain people I e-mail far more often than others and these names are not being chosen by their names/letters typed.

My wife's name is Natasha and in the past I would just type "N" and her personal e-mail would be first to appear, whereas for example when I type "M" a friend who I also frequently e-mail called Mike would appear.

Now I get Mike at the top regardless of the letter chosen, as long as the letter typed in his full name appears anywhere in his name (which is a lot of letters as he has a long full name) and no matter how many e-mails written to my wife or anyone else it makes no difference to the order offered, resulting in my having to choose from the drop down to find the address I want, a longer process than on my old TB where I could hit the enter key after one letter.

Likewise I have an address I e-mail frequently with the word "orders" at the start of the address but when I start typing "orders" it gives a list of other e-mail addresses for the same company address (a number are at the same @ address) and even after typing a few letters the "ord" for example will be in bold but the address still won't have risen to the top for easy selection.

Is there anything I can do to get TB to relearn my preferences and to actually move them to be first choice depending on the letter typed ?

I remember some time ago using an x and z at the start of an entry description in the address book to artificially get addresses to appear first but clearly if typing "ord" can't get the orders address to change position despite being the only address in my address book with those 3 letters in that order then this presumably doesn't work any more.

Have I got to change something on TB to get the clever version back, a tweak in the registry that didn't get picked up by the fresh install ? Or is the later version of TB designed to just not provide this sort of help any more ? (If this has been deprecated I feel it has made TB far less useful as frankly I have yet to find any feature in the new TB that makes it genuinely better than the old version).

Hopefully I am just missing a tweak in the config or whilst this feature has been removed there is a new add on to offset this loss and bring this ability back ?

Thanks in advance for any help

Edit - Re-opened my old version of TB held on a different drive and if I can simply have the behaviour when typing a letter in the "To" section where if I type a "N" say it's first suggestions are all the people whose name begins with "N" (and "o" gets those beginning o etc through the alphabet) then I will be delighted. Cannot believe it's current system where it fixates on a few addresses taking any letter out of the name for those preferred addresses first rather than the actual first letter is how it is meant to work.

Checked my settings between TB versions and both in the composition section of settings are going to the same address book first etc
Cheers

Rich
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tanstaafl
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Posts: 49647
Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm

Re: Training TB to choose "right" addressee

Post by tanstaafl »

What was your old version of Thunderbird?

If you have sent a message to a contact three or more times auto-complete will sort the entries alphabetically, but it will list the main address before the additional email address for that contact.

Auto-complete seems to be working fine for me with version 102.1.2. I haven't noticed any other threads about auto-complete for 102.

Try using help -> troubleshoot mode to temporarily disable add-ons to see if an add-on has bad side effects on auto-complete.

In general Thunderbird stores all of its data in the profile, not the registry. The registry is mainly used for integrating with the rest of windows (MAPI support for example).
charscot
Posts: 225
Joined: August 14th, 2006, 4:38 pm
Location: London, UK

Re: Training TB to choose "right" addressee

Post by charscot »

Should have just tried troubleshooting mode clearly (something I always do with FF issues but for some bizarre reason I didn't do).

Thanks, it was an add-on. Turns out Cardbook was the offending add on.

Thanks for getting back to me, going to spend the rest of the afternoon kicking myself around the room for not doing the obvious before posting !
Cheers

Rich
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