[Mailman-Developers] Correcting the display name in the recipient address

[Barry Warsaw]

On Mar 17, 2016, at 11:27 PM, Aditya Divekar wrote:

>Suppose you have a user with two linked addresses, one of which is the
>preferred address. Only the preferred address has a display name, and the
>user does not. Now in the scenario where the other linked address(not the
>preferred one) is subscribed to a mailing list without providing a display
>name, it would be natural to check if the user has a display name, and use
>that if it exists. But the user too does not have a display name in this
>case. In such a case should we perform a further check and try to use the
>preferred address's display name if it exists or simply use an empty string
>instead?
>
>In the opinion I gave, in case we are not supplied with a display name, we
>should check the user display name followed by the preferred address
>display name, and use them in the specified order respectively. If none
>exist, empty string would be used.
>
>In a more general scenario, as pointed out by Barry to question this
>method, suppose a user has multiple linked addresses, only one of which has
>a display name, and its neither the preferred address, nor the subscribed
>address. Should the display name search algorithm find that one too, since
>it still is a linked address for the user and hence contains valid user
>information?

One other comment.  In the more general case I outlined (i.e. your last
paragraph), *if* we decide to use display_names in other linked addresses, we
can only use ones that are associated with validated addresses.  A user's
preferred address will always be validated.

The other thing about the more general case is that there's no natural
ordering.  So yes, we could use the preferred address first, and then pick an
arbitrary ordering criteria for falling back to all linked, validated
addresses.  That could be alphabetical by email address, or chronological by
validation or registration date.

Cheers,
-Barry