1036626 - Contact (Preview) Pane: Allow copying contact's full (postal) address to clipboard

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 96968

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[Greg]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140605174243

Steps to reproduce:

Feature Request: I'd like to option somewhere to copy to the clipboard a selected contact's complete mailing address (including all parts: street address, city, state/province, postal code, etc.).  This would provide a quick way to transfer this information to a mailing label or envelope to be printed.  

At present, one must open the Properties for the contact, then copy/paste each part individually.

The Contact Pane might be a convenient place to implement this feature, as it's already displaying the entire mailing address along with other information (name, phone number).  Simply allowing the user to select the text already in the Contact Pane to copy to the clipboard would satisfy me.

Another possible implementation would be to add commands to the context menu for a selected contact: Copy Home Address, Copy Business Address, etc.  This would probably take more effort, but it would allow the Address Book to include the name of the contact at the top, or on the ATTN: line, of the mailing address copied to the clipboard.  (The Contact Pane keeps the name is a section separate from the mailing address, so copying both the name+address there would probably require two separate copy/paste operations).

Comment 1

[Rick Jones]

I second this feature request. Simply enabling text select and copy in the contact details display pane would be adequate. You could then easily copy whatever part of the details you wanted.

The inability to do this has a bigger negative impact than might be expected, because if you go into edit mode (where you can select and copy) the data is formatted completely differently, and split up, making it often impossible to copy what you actually need.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Greg & Rick, thanks & you are very right about this feature request. It's a long-standing issue already on record. Address book in general is a TB pain point, more so as there were expectations some years ago to completely replace it with a newly designed AB, which however so far hasn't materialized and it's unclear when it will. The small team of volunteers now maintaining TB is faced with a lot of bad bugs and important RFEs to look into, so it's mostly a question of manpower. I'm hopeful for this particular bug that it can be fixed, but we'll have to be patient. In the meantime, use this addon to make address information copyable:

https://addons.mozilla.org/cs/thunderbird/addon/select-address-book-text/

hth

Comment 3

[Rick Jones]

Thomas - thanks for your response and explanation, but especially for the pointer to the select-address add-on. I'd looked for an add-on before but failed to find it, just installed and it solves the problem. Contrary to a report by one reviewer, it works fine on the latest 31.3 of TB.

thal ("that helped a lot" - is that a new acronym? :-)