Loading recipients from sent is a nightmare

Hello there,
The functionality introduced in v 9.2.1222 about suggesting recipients when writing new email is not working correctly. Quite frankly, it makes it more difficult to write emails than before. While I understand that this was a popular user demand functionality, it should be designed properly.

Right now, the suggestions made during message composition suffer from the following bugs:

  • the addresses from the “sent folder” are doubled or tripled with the addresses from the address book,
  • the addresses from the “sent folder” are intermixed with the addresses from the address book, without any reasonable rule on the order they are displayed with.

How the correct functionality should look like:

  • never show addresses from sent, if they are present in the address book/ contacts,
  • Always show address book contacts first and only after these are all shown, start showing suggestions from the sent folder,
  • graphically draw a visible lines between the address book addresses and sent addresses,
  • allow the user to turn off this functionality (suggest from sent) in the settings menu!

Before this buggy feature introduction, it took me few key strokes to compose an email, as it was obvious that when I start typing the recipient, I intend to send a message to my contact or maybe most used address (should be my contact if its in the address book). Right now, I need to visually search for the address I am looking for from multiple suggestions from the sent folder that don’t make any sense at this time.

Please fix this.
Please don’t make this software go bad.

3 Likes

For myself personal it’s not a problem suggesting recipients from the sent folder as seems to work ok for me, but obviously for yourself and some other users like in the below similar thread it’s an issue with the new update that doesn’t suit everyone.

As I posted at the end of the following thread, eM Client might hopefully then have an option in the future to eg: Disable that in Settings.

2 Likes

I am 100% with you. This really is a nightmare, as adresses / contacts really appear multiple times in the suggest dropdown. It would be REALLY helpful, if I could just turn this off.

See this image for the uselessness and visual cluttery of this feature:
Screenshot 2022-11-24 164010

Or as suggestet by @bremenpl to have a visual divider and the adresses from the sent folder appear on the very bottom of the suggest list.

There are none that appear multiple times.

All I see in your screenshot are 9 different contacts sourced from your Sent folder, and they are all valid search results based on what you entered in the TO field.

The contact is in the format of: name <address>
That is taken from the email header.

Hi Gary,
Really…? While I understand a very plain alghoritmic approach can threat this as 9 different contacts, I think that a slightly smarter one could derive that this is the same address and show it as one email address and all matching names.

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totally agree. as mentioned earlier by @bremenpl it is really messy, that em Client lists all adresses from my sent folder.

As I found out here Predicted contacts and here Email suggestion based on addresses from all sent emails this (mis)behaviour was added in version 9.2.

Thus: a setting would be very great to turn off this behaviour. Would you agree @Gary ?

One more to agree.
One other thing I find frustrating, is the mix of in- and outgoing messages in the same folder, where, as I can figure out, there is no way to disable this behavior - or at least giving them different colors to figure out what is a “Recieved” and what is “Send” message in the sub system.
Hopping for an urgent update :point_up_2:

Look at this feature from the other side. The feature itself and developer’s defence of the messy function is stright proof, why computer will never pilot a car. Emails and contact doesn’t matter. But cars? There are people lives in a game!

In the interest of improving, can you explain a little about what is messy?

@eigenstil asked for suggestions for lk@f and eM Client provided 9 different contacts used in the past that match that. How is that messy?

Surely if only one suggestion was provided, you might consider that messy because the search isn’t accurate.

Look Gary- I compose an email, I know I want to write to John Doe, as this guy is in my contact list. I conpose 5 emails per day to him. I start typing John: Why on earth would his contact suggestion be somewhere in the middle of the list? Why isn’t he the first suggestion? Why a random John Colt, I have sent an email 2 years a go, would be suggested over John doe I chat with every day?

To reaolve this, you need to separate suggested recepients based on whether they are in the contacts or taken from the sent folder.

Imagine you have a special contact with an address you forward emails to maybe store them somewhere, like evernote, todoist, gitlab, whatever. Composing such an email nornaly takes few key strokes. Now you additionally need to look for your contact in the middle of the random list.

Second thing, always suggest based on score. More frequent recepients should be suggested first.

3rd thing, allow for pining suggestions on the top of the list.

4th thing, allow the user to completelly turn this feature off. This is the easiest and the fastest fix one can give untill a feature is fixed.

5th thing, merge suggestions with the same address into one suggestion, but with different names separated with comas.

6th thing, simply do not suggest an address from the sent folder if that address already exists in your contacts list (even if they have different names, it just doesnt make sense).

It seems to me that this is all basic UX stuff, and I am not even a front end developer, just a bare email client user.

1 Like

The thing is that they aren’t the same.

The users asks for suggestions from what they type, and in the above example from @eigenstil are 9 matches that he has used in the past. They are all different. So let the user decide which version they want to use from those offered. That is what this feature provides.

I really think that this is a misunderstanding on what a user wants / blindly believing the user underdtands what he wants. You must see this feature is broken right?

Howcome other email clients got this right, like aquamail on android? The algorithm is simple: first look in contacts, then look in sent folder (but do not show multiple suggestions for the same address, just pick one…).

Again, I am 100% with @bremenpl.

I can see the point from @Gary (that I can’t necessarily remember the exact spelling of the contact directly). But it would be extremly useful to be able to turn this feature off. It clutters the very nice suggest interface and it slows me down in my daily email usage (as @bremenpl pointed out here.)

In my understanding this would be just one single checkbox in the settings: “Search for suggested contacts in my sent folders: Yes/No”. The default option could be “Yes”, so I can just switch it off :slight_smile:

Thanks @eigenstil and I also vote for the fastest fix to just be able to turn this off.

But if the devs really want to fix this and bot just put it under the carpet, then please also improve this functionality as suggested.

One more point regarding different search criteria- in the post with the screenshot from @eigenstil one can see 2 different suggestions with the exact same name. The only difference is that one is enclosed in ‘x’ and one is not… This cannot be by design and is clearly a bug, as it should be displayed as the same suggestion.

image

Yes, lazy programmer will say that these are 2 different strings, but are the emClient developers lazy?

2 Likes

I must agree with the OP. If the app has a “Recipients History” database (and it does!), then that is exactly where suggested eMail addresses should be pulled from (other than the Contacts records). Once the “Recipients History” has been cleared, any eMail addresses (that aren’t in the Contacts records) should be gone for good and any eMail addresses that were used for outgoing eMails (in other words: the Sent folder) must be ignored for this purpose (eMail address suggestions) until the Recipients History database has been repopulated with new eMail addresses from newly created SENT eMails.

That’s exactly how it works in Apple Mail.

I should add one more thing: The only time the SENT folder should be referenced (in regards to this “address suggestions” issue) is when a sent eMail with a NEW outgoing address is actually sent and then ONLY to populate the Previous Recipients database (which is where the other-than-Contacts eMail suggestions should be taken - the database, not the Sent folder). If one deletes an address from the Previous Recipients database (which I’ve done), there should be no reason to look in the Sent folder during the eMail address suggestions function and erroneously provide an address that doesn’t appear in the database.

1 Like

We will be providing an option to disable this, which should be in a future release.

3 Likes

Thanks Gary, thats a good start! Hope the next step is to fix the functionality.

email suggestions
I think the verbiage is unclear. Do I understand the intent?

“Use all recipients from Sent folders for suggestion” means - All recipients which might include a hoard of folks who were also cc’d and/or bcc’d on eMails I’ve responded to?

“Store composed mail recipients for suggestion” means - Only store recipients of eMails I’ve originally generated but NOT as a reply to an incoming eMail? What about replies to an individual?

Regardless…Will this eliminate the duplication of identical eMail addresses from appearing in the suggestions?

1 Like

@Barry_Levine

Regardless…Will this eliminate the duplication of identical eMail addresses from appearing in the suggestions?

I suspect that “de-selecting” the “Use all recipients from Sent folders for suggestion” will then make eM Client work the same for loading recipients from contacts as it was (prior to this change), so like it was in eM Client V9.1 and prior that never suggested recipients from the sent folder.

As far as identical email addresses go, suggest once eM Client has then been updated “with this upcoming fix as per this thread”, suggest you then go into your “recipient’s history” via “Menu / Settings / Mail / Compose” and delete any suggested recipients you don’t want to appear.

image

Then back to duplicated emails… Prior to the update it kept suggesting emails that are already assigned to a contact.