135126 - Mailing List Properties dialogue should not be modal - enable drag & drop of cards/contacts from AB to open Mailing List window

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[James Rome]

The perfectly good (but buggy) mailing list editor was destroyed by the "fix" to
bug 128124. By making the list editing box modal, it is now impossible to see
your list of e-mail addresses to add them to the list.

1) If I single-click a mailing list in the address book pane, it appears in the
top top right window. I cannot then see the names in my main address book.

2) I can drag a name from the main address pane to the mailing list in the
address book pane, the name gets added. But if I do this, I cannot then see the
contents of the list to sheck which names are or are not on it.

3) After doing 2), i cannot delete the name from the list by highlighting it and
clicking the delete key or the delete button.

4) If I double click the list name, the editing window pops up. This is the
right place to edit the list. However because it is now modal, one cannot access
the main address book to drag or even to see the e-mail names! Furthermore,
again deleteing does not work. THIS DIALOG CANNOT BE MODAL!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have complained about this many times on the 128124 thread, but no one seems
to have actually tried to maintain a mailing list and I have been totally
ignored. This is real stopper for people using mailing lists.

Comment 1

[Michael Gabriel]

confirming, i cant delete mailing lists once created on moz 1.0 rc2

Comment 2

[Michael Gabriel]

WFM 2002082404 trunk win2k

Comment 3

[James Rome]

The list editing window is still quite useless. (That comes up if you
double-click the list name). You cannot drag to it or delete from it.

The only way to add names (that you do not know off hand) is to r=drag them from
the main list to the lists name. But when you do this, you cannot see the
contents of the list. If it is big, that makes it really hard to use.

Comment 4

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

mass re-assign.

Comment 5

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Per the original report, items (1) (2) and the first part of (4) are still 
problems; the inability to delete -- item (3) and the second part of (4) -- is 
working for me with current builds.  (Presumably that led to the "WFM" reported 
in comment 2.)

(In reply to comment #0)
> THIS DIALOG CANNOT BE MODAL!!!!!!!!!!!!

Agreed; it seems obvious from bug 128124 that making it modal was a hack, 
probably because no-one had the time to do it correctly.  Bug 115904 is the 
analog to this problem for regular address cards.  
(Bug 128169 is a badly conceived bug for half-fixing the problem.)

Updating summary to get at the real issue.

Comment 6

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 179460 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[James Rome]

Thank you Mike for finally treating this bug with the respect that it deserves.
A lot of the problems that I think caused the dialog to be made modal were
solved when the bug was fixed to allow display names to be "lastname, firstname".

But still you cannot see the members of the list while you are trying to add new
members from your main phonebook.

Comment 8

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 143355 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy y'all,

my tb info ...
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051201 Thunderbird/1.5 - Build ID: 2005120115

as the zero poster said, this problem - the inability to access BOTH the mailing list window AND the address book window - prevents one from seeing the address book contents when one wishes to add more addresses to the list.

yes, i _know_ that one can close the mailing list window and then select the address book and THEN drag addresses into the mailing list. this is not sufficient. one needs to see both sets of addresses when changing a mailing list.

yes, i _know_ that the mailing list window says "type email addresses to add them to the mailing list:". the point is that such should NOT be the only way to add to the list when that window is open. 

take care,
lee

Comment 10

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy y'all,

sorry for the spam - i just noticed the following ...

"Product:" currently shows "mozilla application suite". 
"Assigned To:" currently shows "[e-mail]".

since this problem is also on thunderbird, could/should those be changed to some more accurate or more inclusive value? i don't know enuf about the structure of things to recommend a value.

take care,
lee

Comment 11

[James Rome]

I don't know how to do it, but this bug applies to Thunderbird as well...
This has been a problem for going on 4 years!

Comment 12

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

*** Bug 296274 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

One of the main reasons for this RFE (the UX of which is bad enough to be a BUG) is to enable drag & drop from anywhere (including AB) into the Mailing List dialogue.
We need this in the summary because people are filing and morphing all sorts of badly defined bugs about drag and drop issue(s).

Comment 14

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Sorry for spam, pls scrap the "drag n drop plaintext *from anywhere*" part of my comment 13, that's the part which actually works to some limited extent. So this bug is only about dragging from the underlying AB window into the Mailing List dialogue window, which currently isn't possible bc. it's application-modal after the hack-fix for problems of bug 128124.

Comment 15

[James Rome]

This is now 10 years old!!!!
Mailing lists are still really hard to do because you cannot access your underlying complete list to find the names you need to type in. On a Mac, it is even worse because the dialog is fixed to cover the main list.

Put this back to being a separate window that supports drag and drop!

Comment 18

[Audrey Songy]

Attachment: same problem

Thanks from lolesriperp1974.