Hello everyone! Now that I’ve come to love and rely on K-9 for most of my mail, I keep stumbling over its inability to efficiently and flexibly handle non-address book mail addresses.
Professionals often need to email lots of strangers. Think research, ad hoc meetings, mail addresses pulled from the web, attencance lists and the like - in short, people you want to contact first before adding them anywhere.
Most mail clients allow a certain flexibility regarding the way those mail addresses are being entered, a single ; or > or comma shouldn’t spoil the workflow. Why not K-9? The issue was flashed before but no action was taken. Thoughts?
My instinct was to use a comma, which worked. I tested with a semicolon which also worked. As cited in the issue #6050 that you linked, a space is a valid character in a display name. It never would have occurred to me to use it as a delimiter.
I suppose this may be a generational issue that doesn’t effect those of us whose habits were formed before autocomplete was ubiquitous.
I see this as something best solved by training. Introducing such training into the UI unobtrusively might be a viable solution.
The question is, training who? The mail client or its user? I don’t think it is too much to ask that things just work the way they’re supposed and reasonably expected to.
As things are, K-9 will neither let you paste something in the recipient fields when it doesn’t like one or more characters, nor will it accept a string of comma-separated addresses that any other app rightfully recognises as being a mailing list.
Too often it isn’t really clear why K-9 chokes on something or why one can’t get those 100 messages out on the fly. A detailed how-to and/or informative error messages would be great, a fix even greater
Update: I modified my mailing lists using ‘search & repace all’ in QuickEdit+, changing their format to comma-separated as suggested - e.g. aa@bb.com,bb@cc.com - yet pasting multiple mail addresses still won’t work.
I have never tried pasting multiple recipients into the To field in K-9. I would not expect that to work. I would expect typing a comma or semicolon after a single pasted address to work.
I tested pasting two comma-separated adresses, and the field does not accept that input. While I had not expected it to work, the way it did not work differed from my expectation, though perhaps for the better. Pasting one address works as I would expect.
Attempting to find a solution for your desire to add all recipient adresses at once, I tried to add a contact group name, but K-9 did nothing. When the name was short enough to appear as a pattern in a contact email address, it would suggest the matching address or addresses.
I understand your use case a little more clearly now, but do not know how to accomplish your desired outcome.
Thank you for looking into this, much appreciated! Cut & paste would be my preferred way of working - without having to pay too much attention to extra characters like " and <>.
If that cannot be done, perhaps an ‘import’ function could be created, telling K-9 to load a specific text file that contains the recipient addresses…
