Roundcubemail: Space separated recipients

Created on 21 Sep 2018 · 6Comments · Source: roundcube/roundcubemail

When editing an email's To, CC, and BCC fields, it's natural for someone to space separate the list of email addresses.

I am aware that the recipient fields expect a comma separated list of email address, so this is not a bug report, it's a usability suggestion.

Steps To Reproduce

Type [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] in one of the recipient fields.

Roundcube: v1.3.6
Skin: larry
Plugins: managesieve, password, enigma

Expected Behaviour

Email is sent to the 3 email addresses [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].

Actual Behaviour

Email is sent to the email address "[email protected] [email protected]" <[email protected]>.

Mail composing enhancement

Source

omarchehab98

All 6 comments

Please not that the common format of entering recipients (mostly when using autocompletion) is "". With the display name prepended, the space character is already used to separate it from the actual email address and therefore cannot be used to separate recipients. With autocompletion showing suggestions, how would you allow to refine the suggestions (e.g. "John" yields 20 matches) if the space character will already terminate a (yet incomplete) recipient?

thomascube on 22 Sep 2018

Look, I understand that this might be hard to implement because of a conflict with an existing feature. But quite frankly, it doesn't matter. I am reporting this as a serious usability issue that most people will have issues with.

Yesterday, I had one of my clients complain about this. I looked into it and it turns out they sent an email with the following BCC: "[email protected] [email protected] ... [email protected]" <[email protected]>. I don't blame them one bit. How can your system accept such a name in the first place? It's so easy to detect something is very wrong in this case. I mean, if an email address's associated name contains an email address, the least you can do is tell the user that something is seems off. In the current version of Roudcube, it just sends the email as if nothing is wrong. So, instead of sending an email to 14 recipients, the user would end up sending it to 1 with a name composed of 13 freaking email addresses-- that's insane!

If you don't want to change the fact that space doesn't separate email addresses, the least you can do is add a message that teaches the user the format of listing recipients or a pop up that warns the user that something is wrong with their recipients.

omarchehab98 on 23 Sep 2018

Compose a new email, add 3 email addresses to the To field

<a href="alice@example.com">alice@example.com</a> <a href="bob@example.com">bob@example.com</a> <a href="charlie@example.com">charlie@example.com</a> in the To field

Save the email as a draft then open the draft you saved.

<a href="alice@example.com">alice@example.com</a> and <a href="bob@example">bob@example</a> is the name of the email address <a href="charlie@example.com">charlie@example.com</a>

Why did your recipient parsing algorithm make such an assumption? Do you honestly think "[email protected] [email protected]" is a name of [email protected]?

omarchehab98 on 23 Sep 2018

👍1

I would not call it a serious issue, because you're the first person requesting it. It's like that for more than 10 years. Thunderbird also does not accept such input (though it will not send the mail in such case), Gmail however does. So, I think we could indeed do better.

alecpl on 23 Sep 2018

👍1

Hello, I've ecountered this problem too this morning, I'm on an older version of Roundcube but the issue seems the same. Probably a lot more of email have gone missing without noticing, only yesterday an user asked me for this strange behaviour. We use roundcube only in emergency cases so I was going to update thinking this was just a little bug of an older version but now I think this is "normal".
I think that a small box would be appreciated just like the one when object is empty, who knows how many mail have gone missing for just low attention to typing?
Thanks in advance