Beat me to it. I wonder how long this has been in development in relation to that story breaking. Unfortunately, I don't believe it would matter in that case as the sender wasn't using Gmail.
Darn, I thought this was something to deal with people sending you stuff that was addressed to somebody else they know with the same name and nearly the same email address. I'm not talking about people who have me in their address book, just random people who fat-finger an email address.
Thank god. Having a fairly common first and last name, I actually do get an email or two a month addressed to the wrong person. And it's usually addressed to a lot of people.
Although I did kinda enjoy it from a voyeuristic perspective, you'd be surprised what kinds of stuff people email to many of their close friends.
I recently mailed short set of logins and passwords to my old customer instead of my current customer. Source of my mistake was that these two people shared both first and last name. Fortunately I felt uneasy and double checked to whom actually I sent the email, and after noticing mistake I promptly changed passwords and sent them to the right guy this time.
Wouldn't it make more sense to not autosuggest certain names in the first place in that AJAX drop-down? This kinda feels like they're building a feature to defend against another feature. Perhaps these guys need something else to do?
If you normally mail Bob X and Alice, instead of Bob Y and Alice; however, you frequently mail Bob Y. How would it know if you always type Bob's name first?
The grand-parent post suggests improved auto-complete, but that is invalid because there is no additional information when entering the first of many names. Google implemented this feature outside of auto-complete because it only makes logical sense in the context of two or more recipients.
Sorry, but huh? There are still people on this planet not using auto-complete when writing E-Mail? Auto-complete is not a feature, it’s a must. No need to defend against. Who the hell writes whole E-Mail adresses?
Isn't this typical behavior for an email client? Thunderbird and Outlook do this (auto-suggest). I don't know about other web mail clients, since GMail is the only one I use...
