1777472 - Address Book: Improve filtering and grouping

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1777471

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[Rainer Meier]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0

Steps to reproduce:

Unable to display grouped view by any address book fields.

Actual results:

Address book just provides list view allowing to sort by display name, first name or last name and selecting the sort ordering.

This is very limited. It does not allow to display the list by group or group by organization or category (well, requested in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1777471) or any other field.

Expected results:

It would be great to create custom address book fields and also allow the list view to be grouped by fields like company, role, category or other fields.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Hi Rainer, thank you for your feedback! I totally understand where you're coming from.

• Have you tried Address book > List display options > Switch to horizontal layout? The tabular layout will allow you to sort by most fields including organization etc.
• If your search words are unique enough, searching (which is filtering) e.g. for a unique term in Organization field may also work well.
• Are you aware of Advanced Address Book Search (Edit > Find > Search Addresses)? That should find the needle in the haystack.
• We have restored Custom1-4 fields in Bug 1776129, will land in release channel soon. You can definitely use those for targeted searching/filtering. You might want to adjust your AB quickfilter search ≡ > Preferences > General > [Config Editor…], then search for mail.addr_book.quicksearchquery.format and add Custom fields if they're missing. Alternatively, you could abuse the nickname field and populate that with unique identifiers for each group.
• Also note: In composition, you can display Contacts side bar (F9) which will also use mail.addr_book.quicksearchquery.format iirc.

Otherwise, I think this is essentially the same as your bug 1777471; pls don't refile.
Bug 1777471 has been resolved as duplicate of bug 75711, which imo is correct.
I'm a strong advocate for bug 75711 (14 duplicates), we really need proper categories for contacts. Maybe for 114, because atm it's all about removing rough edges from the new AB. Grouping/filtering by category then becomes the next logical step UI-wise.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Attachment: Screenshot 1: Advanced AB search dialog

To get this Advanced Address Book Search dialog, you need to display the menu bar (e.g. press Alt key on Windows), then: Edit > Find > Search Addresses

Comment 3

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Thomas

Many thanks for your inputs. I did not know about some of the options:

• horizontal layout: Good hint but it's just displaying a tabbed view but I am still unable to group or somehow organize my contacts here. It's just a big list of contacts with no way to collapse based on attributes. Yes I know the categories/grouping is still in request phase too but this is just so much more annoying than what you can do in Outlook for example by just dragging the "category" column header to the "grouping" bar and then having collapsible groups for each category.
• Entering search terms might be an option but leads to overmatch and requires lots of typing. I am having about 900 contacts in the list and as far as I know I cannot even filter by field. So if I enter "work" it will display contacts belonging to organization "workforce" as well as one with address containing "workmenstreet". Just as a dumb example of course. I can't even have a category/group column yet. I also cannot filter for certain fields like "organization:xy name:bla" as of my knowledge.
• Advanced search is a "solution" for this allowing to filter for certain field contents. Despite the fact the "Search Addresses" is so burried in the (hidden) edit menu that it did not even get a shortcut assigned to it I also found it cumbersome to use. I am not even able to save some search queries so I need to build it up from scratch each time. I am not intending to lose 5 minutes of building a query each time I look for a contact. It's just not user friendly.
• Updating quickfilters in config editor might be an option but those requirements for organizing contacts are so basic that normal users should just be able to use it without special training or even config editor. How can I explain to a typical backoffice person how to use this efficiently?

I am just trying to provide input for usability improvements. I am by no means a friend of Outlook but the contact management is just worlds apart from what TB offers. This is also why I am using Outlook for Calendar/Contact management only (and sync to cloud services). I would love to ditch Outlook as it is so much worse in IMAP mail handling (not using it for this at all) but haven't managed to accept the downsides of TB address book. Every time I am pushing TB to a consumer space as an "Outlook replacement" people complain about contact and calendar management and ask to drop TB in favor of Outlook. Even though e-Mail management is so much better in TB.
In regards of Address-Book I do recommend developers to also have a look at not only Outlook but even other alternatives like eM-Client which do pretty fine with contacts management including groups, mailing lists, categories, filtering and search.