Re: [Evolution] Order of preferred email addresses in Evolution contact

[Nick Jenkins <nickpj gmail com>]

Hi Ben,

> This problem concerns the order of preference of emails when these are
> added to a Contact. I might expect that the "first" email (as entered
> in
> the Contacts dialog) is the "preferred" email (e.g., displayed on the
> Contact's address card when this is formatted in the list, first
> choice
> for sending emails to); and that as you go to the second, third and
> fourth email fields the priority goes down accordingly. But it seems
> that in my installation the reverse is the case: that an email entered
> in the last field takes precedence over fields 3, 2 and 1, with 1
> apparently receiving the lowest priority (empty fields excepted). The
> same may apply to phone numbers, though these aren't so obvious, since
> (unlike emails) a person rarely has two or more home (or work, etc.)
> phone numbers to rank in priority order.

Thank you! This has been slightly annoying me every time I email people
with multiple email addresses - I have them listed in the contact in the
order of importance of their email addresses, and one in particular I
email daily has 3 addresses (one they get immediately, one they check
once a week, and one they check once every few months)... so whenever I
email them I am am always typing their name, and pressing the down arrow
twice to select the 3rd email address listed, which is their primary
email address. I guess I never really thought about what it's doing, but
yes, you're right, it's listing them in reverse order^^, and yes, it's
kind of annoying and I wish it would list them in the order they were
listed in the contact, which to me is the most intuitive thing. So, long
story short, please consider this a "confirmed - me too!".

-----------------------------------
^^ = current used order seems to be this in the contact's details:
[ email 4 ]  [email 2]
[ email 3 ]  [email 1]

For English-speakers, I imagine the general expectation would probably
be that the order should match the order of reading text (left to right,
top to bottom), i.e. top-left should be email 1, top-right should be
email 2, bottom-left should be email 3, bottom-right should be email 4,
although the positions of 2 and 3 could maybe be swapped if people
expected this ordering.

I.e. my guess is that most English-speakers' mental model is probably
this, and that Evo should probably try to match it:
[ email 1 ]  [email 2]
[ email 3 ]  [email 4]
-----------------------------------

> I'm running Evolution 2.26.1 on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty).

Ditto, and I'm pretty sure that 2.24.3 on 8.10 did the same thing too,
so my guess would be that it's going to be still be present in the
latest git/dev version. Therefore, the best thing is probably to log
this in bugzilla so that it can be recorded/tracked/etc. I've used your
email as the description text (hope this is okay!), and added a bit of
info from the above, and it's now logged as:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587382 (Under Evo -> mailer ->
Usability, which as-far-as-I-can-tell is probably the most accurate
description).

-- All the best,
Nick.