1144596 - mark contact/email as obsolete/dead/404 / ability to disable contact for address autocomplete

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[M Lopez-Ibanez]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0
Build ID: 20150306140238

Steps to reproduce:

Sometimes contacts or their emails become obsolete, for example, because the contact changed email address. It is still useful to keep the contact/email in the address book because this is the way that Thunderbird allows finding old messages from the contact and because the contact's entry in the AB may contain additional info (photo, notes, etc). However, trying to send email to the address will only result in an Unknown address error 550.

It would be extremely useful if it were possible to mark an email/contact as not able to receive email anymore, and thus, give an error (or some indication when composing an email) before actually sending the email.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I should think this was already reported, but i'm not finding it.

Comment 2

[Codain]

I would like to revive this enhancement proposal because as a Thunderbird user I think this feature would bring a lot. Basically peoples are changing there emails (they leave companies, the change provider...) and it may happen that I don't remember to which address to send a new email. On the other hand I don't want to remove the email address from my contact book because I still want to know who is/was behind which email, use search tool... The old school way of handling this issue was to modify the contact name to add something like "obsolete". I think Thunderbird can do better.

To go ahead I suggest 4 topics to address:

1. Be able to flag an email address as obsolete. I see several possibilities (from easy to implement to hard to implement)
   • When editing the contact, a check box in front of each email address would be enough
   • When right clicking on a contact in the email view, today we can add/edit the contact. A new option would help to flag/unflag the address if the contact is in the address book
   • When a mailer-daemon mail is received, some text recognizion might help to detect that it is because the email has been deleted and thus propose to flag the address as non valid anymore
2. Hide flaged contact when looking for To/Cc/Bcc contacts (but not when searching in the address book). Another option would be to not hide them in some search cases but to always display them with a "Non valid anymore" label
3. When reading/displaying an email, add a label next to the contact to say that the email address used is not valid anymore
4. When sending an email/responding to a received email warn if in the list of recipient there is a flaged email address (same feedback than the "Did you forget to attach a file?" feature)

I think this feature is different from Bug 387869: I don't want to remove a contact but to flag it.

Comment 4

[chrizilla]

RE: comment #1 and Whiteboard: [dupeme?]: I couldn't find any dupes.

Comment 5

[chrizilla]

I deem all of Codain's ideas in comment #2 excellent.

I'll transfer additional noteworthy ideas for how to handle obsolete addresses from the CardBook brother bug:

• remove them from auto-complete list
• mark them in header (of msg preview pane): icon in the address pill and/or strikethrough-text
• in contact details: add expired on date field (see screenshot below)
  • the date field should be user-editable but prefilled with most recent Gloda record of the obsolete address

Comment 6

[chrizilla]

Attachment: obsolete addresses - design idea.png

image content: design ideas for obsolete addresses in contact details

proposed changes seen in the image:

• move "minus" icon to the left side
• replace "default" radio button with star (bug 1897624) and move to the left
• add expired checkboxes
  • a checked checkbox denotes an expired address
  • checking a checkbox has these effects:
    • The checkbox is displayed in red color.
    • The background color of the obsolete address's text box changes to red.
    • An expired on text field appears to the right. It is user-editable but prefilled with the adress's most recent Gloda record.