1814330 - Unable to set a default email address for Google CardDAV contact

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[Tim]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/109.0

Steps to reproduce:

Open the address book
Select a contact who has more than one email address
Select "Edit"
Two email addresses were listed. At the right, next to each email address is a radio button for "default". Neither is active.
Select the radio button of the second email address, to set that address as default
Save the contact

Actual results:

The selected radio button is marked as active.
The email address below the contact name is updated to the selected new default email address before the save button is pressed.
On "Save" the contact is shown and the email address under the contact name reverts to the top email entry after approximately 1 second.

Expected results:

The email address should not revert, and the new default setting should remain.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

• Tim, what type of Addressbook produces this bug for you? (local AB, CardDav etc.)
• Are you able to change other aspects of the contact, like adding another email address?
• How was the contact generated in your Ab? (Import, manually filled etc.)

Comment 2

[Tim]

Thomas

This is google cardDAV address book for a standard ***@gmail.com account

I have had no other issues with the address book manager, and I actually think this address book manager is really good.

I've had the gmail account for a long time, so this contact would have been imported

I just created a test contact with a name and two email addresses. I created the test contact in my gmail CardDAV address book and it shows the same behaviour. If I move it to the personal address book then the change sticks properly (works as expected).

If I move that contact back from the personal address book to the google contacts address book it reverts to the first listed email address again.

Comment 3

[Tim]

(In reply to Tim from comment #2)

Thomas

This is google cardDAV address book for a standard ***@gmail.com account

I have had no other issues with the address book manager, and I actually think this address book manager is really good.

I've had the gmail account for a long time, so this contact would have been imported

I just created a test contact with a name and two email addresses. I created the test contact in my gmail CardDAV address book and it shows the same behaviour. If I move it to the personal address book then the change sticks properly (works as expected).

If I move that contact back from the personal address book to the google contacts address book it reverts to the first listed email address again.

Just to confirm, the CardDAV account is set to sync every 1 minute, and is not marked as read only.

Comment 4

[Tim]

(In reply to Tim from comment #3)

(In reply to Tim from comment #2)

Thomas

This is google cardDAV address book for a standard ***@gmail.com account

I have had no other issues with the address book manager, and I actually think this address book manager is really good.

I've had the gmail account for a long time, so this contact would have been imported

I just created a test contact with a name and two email addresses. I created the test contact in my gmail CardDAV address book and it shows the same behaviour. If I move it to the personal address book then the change sticks properly (works as expected).

If I move that contact back from the personal address book to the google contacts address book it reverts to the first listed email address again.

Just to confirm, the CardDAV account is set to sync every 1 minute, and is not marked as read only.

correct

The sync works very well, and I can add and modify contacts on my phone or through google contacts on the web and the updates occur reliably. Other changes I make to contacts using Thunderbird are also propagated back to the google contacts reliably.

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Thanks Tim for your replies (kindly avoid quoting too much of your own comments repeatedly, one line for context should be enough in this case).

From my own tests, confirming for TB 102.7.1 (64-bit), Win10, also on Daily 111.0a1 (2023-02-08) (64-bit).
It's just not possible to make any email address the default address on a Google contact (via CardDAV) and make that stick.

• Pretends to accept the change while still editing the contact,
• then after saving, it reverts instantly in the contact display (which seems to indicate that the server is refusing and reverting this change).
• Upon next edit, all radioboxes are cleared again, and the actual default address used by TB doesn't change either, it's always the first.

I'd hope that the impact of this is moderate, but not sure. Not being able to set a default address on Google Contacts is certainly annoying and makes the Write action in the address book pretty much no-op for reporter's scenario.

Workaround: Put the desired default email address into the first email slot, and the former first one in some other slot. Clumsy and error-prone, but possible.

Alex, would you like to set a priority for this?

Comment 6

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

I looked at Google Contacts and the "default" flag doesn't seem to be supported.
So, not sure if we can even make it happen if Google doesn't respect the CardDav specs.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2426#section-3.3.2

Comment 7

[Tim]

That's not helpful from Google!

Thanks for looking into it.

Comment 8

[Tim]

I have sent feedback to Google through the google contacts webpage:

"Hi

Google Contacts appears not to support setting a default email address for a contact and instead just uses the first in the list.

As I understand it, the CardDAV specification should include a flag for setting the default, and the absence of this setting leads to inconsistency with some contact management software.

Could a flag for this be enabled?"