225585 - email is not an unique identifier

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 45946

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Address Book & Contacts, defect)

Description

[Benoît Rigaut]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624

Email is not an unique identifier in the address book. This leads to incorrect
situations with several card corresponding to the same email, with just a
different name. Duplicated cards are created via automatic Email Address Collection.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Have an email in your address book
2. Receive an email with the email from your address book
3. Sometimes the email in creating another card with the same email
Actual Results:  
2 cards with the same email

Expected Results:  
consider having already this email in the address book, based on an unique email
identifier

maybe use the name to complete a missing field on an existing card corresponding
to an existing email - but definitively do not update an existing field

Comment 1

[Patrick]

Can you say if this is related to differences in cases in the e-mail addresses?
eg. [e-mail] gets added even if you already have a [e-mail]?

Comment 2

[Benoît Rigaut]

Yes the issue can be related to differences in case in the email address. But
not only. There's another case where you can create duplicate card with the same
email.

If you already have a card with the email [e-mail] and the First Name
"Benoit" associated (no any other data). If you send an email to "Benoit Rigaut
<[e-mail]>" another card will be created with the same email and with
First Name "Benoit", Last Name "Rigaut", and Display "Benoit Rigaut".

Various issues are related to this, because any subtle changes to an email like
first/last inversion "Rigaut Benoit", or case change "Benoit RIGAUT" leads to a
duplicate entry in the address book.

Another point is that you can decide manually to create a card with a right
click on an email ("Add to Address Book" feature) and a card will be created
even if another one already exists with the same email. Email unicity sould be
preserve first for consistency of an address book. There should have a warning,
or an automagic feed of new data to an existing card (though it's not obvious to
decide what should be the conciliation algorithm to mix old and new data.)

Comment 3

[Andreas Kunz]

dup

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 45946 ***