222725 - Add support for sub folders in address book (hierarchical address book)

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[Ritz, Bruno]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7

It could help much to organize addresses if one could create sub folders inside
an address book instead of having to add a new address book to the (flat) list.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 283453 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2

[Sheldon King]

Reference:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=1861780#1861780

Comment 3

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

*** Bug 327019 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Wong, Paul]

Is there any work for this bug? I think thunderbird is lacking a lot of very basic features like this... Right now, I have to keep 4 different address books..., and it seems like some thunderbird feature assume you only have one address book (e.g. the do not check spam for emails from address from "this" address book)

Hope someone can work on this one.

Comment 5

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

*** Bug 355346 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Miles]

Presumably what is meant by "folders" is "lists"?   If so, we certainly need the ability to create lists within lists.  Currently this is not possible, hence I need to add address books.  And this causes serious errors because an address book is not auto updated when another AB or the PAB is updated.

Comment 7

[Miles]

Isn't this a dupe of bug 40301 which has been open since 2000?  If not, what is the difference?

Comment 8

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

The reference to the forum is quite correct. What is needed is a hierarchical address book with (subfolders) within folders, for example:

Personal Address Book:
  -- Work contacts
     + Spices & Co.
     + Freelance work
  -- Non-work related
     + Fishing Club
     + Bowling Club
     + Family and Friends
     + House sale contacts

It's simply unworkable to have hundreds of contacts thrown into the one pot without being able to separate them into categories.

People are used to it from other e-mail clients.

The two comments above (#6 and #7): No, it's not about a mailing list being contained in another mailing list, it's about organizing contacts into a hierarchy.

Comment 9

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

OK. I just made this discovery. Be default, TB has two address books, one called "Personal Address Book", the other one: "Collected Addresses".

I didn't find a place anywhere in the UI where you can add another address book to get the hierarchy that's required.

Well, if you import an address book from a file (I used a CSV), TB creates more and more address books, see enclosed screen shot.

Comment 10

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Attachment: You can see multiple address books in this screen shot.

Comment 11

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

OK, sorry, to create a new address book:

Address book window:
  File > New > Address Book.
Well, I expected a right-click-menu ;-)

Comment 14

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Sheldon King from comment #2)
> Reference:
> 
> http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=1861780#1861780

Note, the motoviation expressed in the above thread is facilitate syncing to Plaxo, which only syncs one address book