1540510 - Feature request: "inactive" option for contacts to prevent address auto-completion

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1144596

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[Andrew Janke]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.86 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

So, here's my issue. I have 25 years of email history in my Thunderbird setup. And I have Thunderbird Address Book and macOS Contacts entries for many of the people I've corresponded with. (I'm running Thunderbird 60.6.1 on macOS 10.1.4.)

The trouble is, some of my correspondents have used several email addresses over the years. And some of those email addresses are no longer valid. E.g. my pal Joe Shmoe used [e-mail] when he was in college, [e-mail] when he got his first job, [e-mail] later, and now is a big shot at [e-mail].

When I want to send an email to Joe, I hit the "Write" button and type in "shmoe" in the first "To:" field that appears. It finds matches, I hit Tab to accept the first one, and go on to fill in the Subject and body fields.

The problem is, the first match that Thunderbird presents in this case is [e-mail], and after I send my email, it bounces because that email address is no longer valid. (Or, worst case, that email address has been re-used by an unrelated person with the same name who is now going to Big State U.)

I would like the "To:" auto-complete to only present suggestions that are currently-used email addresses for my recipients.

I can't fix this by just removing the contact for [e-mail] from my Address Book. I have an email correspondence history in my old emails with him, so I still want that email address to be associated with his name/identity. I just don't want it to be presented as an auto-complete suggestion when I'm creating a new email now.

Maybe this could be solved by having something like an "Active/Inactive" field for Contacts in the Address Book. Inactive Contacts would still be retained, but they would not be presented as auto-complete suggestions in address fields for new emails.

Broader issue: the Thunderbird Address Book seems to only support two email addresses per "person", in the form of the "Email" and "Additional Email" fields. It's 2019, and many people have more than two email addresses, especially if you count historical ones. I'm approaching 20 email addresses, personally. Perhaps it's time to transition to a many-to-one model for mapping contact identities to email addresses? macOS already does it this way; I don't know what Windows and Linux have for contact managers or what their models is.

Actual results:

Addressed email to [e-mail]

Expected results:

Should have addressed the email to [e-mail], or his current personal [e-mail] email address.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

This is covered in bug 1144596 and friends