1233427 - Allow use of unlimited customized name/value pairs in contact information

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[SkyLined]

The type of information that can be edited for a contact in the Address Book is limited in number and name, e.g. you can provide a value for "Email" and "Additional Email", but you cannot add more than two email addresses or named entries such as "Work email" or "Home email".

There is an "other" tab, where you can add 4 "custom" entries, but that does not allow you to change the name either, so you have to add both the value and a description of the type of information to the field. AFAIK you cannot use those custom fields as email addresses or phone numbers.

The layout is inconsistent: you can enter two email addresses in the "contact" tab, but if you want to add two physical address, you have to add one in the "work" and one in the "private" tab. There is one "chat name" field in the "contact" tab and a separate "chat" tab with a bunch of entries, so the use for a "chat name" field is unclear. The contact's birthday must be entered in the "private" tab, below the address, rather than on the "contact" tab, where I would expect to find it.

Other address books, such as Gmail contacts, allow any number of entries for things such as email, address, phone number, etc. Synchronization with such address books is only partially possible as customized names will have to be discarded and the number of possible entries is limited.

IMHO The current address book offers a severely limited subset of what others offer, and is inconsistent in layout. More and more people are syncing data nowadays, so people will start to notice the differences when they lose information when syncing data from these other options to Thunderbird.

Might I suggest reworking contact information to:
1) Allow adding an unlimited number of: email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, birth/anniversary/etc dates, chat ids, websites and custom value entries?
2) Allow customizing the name for each such entry?
3) Create a more consistent layout, e.g. a tab for "Main", "Email", "Phone", "Address", "Date", "Chat", "Website", "Custom". Where the "Main" tab would contain any information of which there can be only one value, and the others containing a table of entries.