117773 - Many address books should be able to export to the same file

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[Hakon]

I think it should be possible to choose at the Export session which address
books should be included, either all or just some, to one same file. Anyway, you
should clearify what is going to happen when exporting an address book. It's
somewhat ambiguous. Is it just the current card, is it the current address book,
or is it ALL address books?

Comment 1

[Ninoschka Baca]

It should make it more clear what the Export feature is doing (exporting the
address book, the card?)

Comment 2

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

mass re-assign.

Comment 3

[Luke Kendall]

I second the request above.  Today UI I wished to copy all my address books from one computer to another.  I have many address books.  I was very surprised to learn that the expected way to do this is to manually select each address book, export it to a separate file, transfer the whole collection to the new computer, then manually import each address book.  I gather that it's possible to copy the abook.mab and history.mab files, but apparently the same is not true for all the other .mab files in your profile.

I was quite astonished that this tedious, error prone, and awkward process is the accepted way to do something which looks like it should be supported in the UI by selecting All.  Instead, that exports an empty file.

I'm non-plussed.  Thunderbird is usually excellent.  It appears this use-case has been overlooked, and I assume many users simply accept the pain of moving their address books (and perhaps, do not as a rule try to organise their addresses into related categories, so do not have large numbers of address books).

Please consider implementing this 11-year old enhancement.  I understand it's not as simple as it seems if you were to try to allow merging of old address books with new, but given that some addresses would have been deleted (and should stay deleted), and some added, and some changed, I suspect that *merging* address books is not really a good idea.  Replacing an old address book with a new one seems more correct.  And certainly, in the case where the new address book did not previously exist, the expected operation is quite obvious I feel.