248786 - Problems with drag & drop of card without email address to Mailing List object; dragging multiple selected cards to Mailing List fails for card without email address & all subsequent cards of selection; undefined states: List in AB view vs.List Properties

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[Ernie Dinklefwat]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616

When dragging contacts (cards) to mail lists, only contacts with e-mail
addresses are allowed in.  Contacts without e-mail addresses either don't appear
in the lists, or appear as a blank list.

This might seem obvious, since it is technically a "mail list," but many people
like to keep their contacts sorted by lists, regardless of whether or not they
have an e-mail address.  More importantly, other address books DO allow this
option.  Mozilla should, too, to keep import/export consistent.  Perhaps you
could call the lists "folders," like most other address books do.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a new list
2. Drag a contact who doesn't have an e-mail address from personal address book
to the new list
3. Note that in new list, the contact is not listed, or is displayed as a blank
contact.

Actual Results:  
In new list, the contact without e-mail address is not listed, or is displayed
as blank contact.

Expected Results:  
Allowed the contact into the list

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Testing with Mozilla 1.7.7, Win2K, I am seeing a slight wrinkle on this.  If I 
drag the card without the email address to the list as the first action, I see a 
partial duplicate card (containing only the name, none of the other info such as 
phone or address) being created in the AB, and that duplicate *is* included in 
the list.

If I then delete the duplicate from the list, and try again, there is no 
apparent action.  Also, there is no error seen in the JS console 
(ref bug 276707).

Same symptom seen in TB 1.0+0414.

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Further info: You can't get the card into a mailing list using the mailing-list 
edit dialog, because autocomplete doesn't work unless there's an email address 
in the card.

You can, however, create a new *address book* and drag the card to that, 
preserving all the information therein.

Comment 3

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

*** Bug 319450 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

*** Bug 133586 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

*** Bug 323900 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Andrea Govoni]

I reproduced this issue with the shipping SeaMonkey 2.0 build and with very
recent SeaMonkey 2.1a1pre [1] and Thunderbird 3.1a1pre [2] nightly builds but I didn't see the behavior described in comment 1 since in my tests the contact is never added to the mailing list.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a fresh new profile in SeaMonkey 2.0.
2. Open the Address Book.
3. Dismiss the account creation wizard.
4. Create a contact without e-mail address in the "Personal Address Book" address book.
5. Create a mailing list in the "Personal Address Book" address book.
6. Close and reopen the Address Book window (as per bug 530244).
7. Dismiss the account creation wizard again.
8. Drag&drop the contact without e-mail address on the empty mailing list.

Actual Results:
The contact is not copied.

Expected Results:
The contact is added to the mailing.

Notice that when the contact is dropped on the mailing list, the string "1 contact copied" is printed in the status bar.


[1] Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.5; en-US;
rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20091116 SeaMonkey/2.1a1pre
[2] Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.5; en-US;
rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20091118 Shredder/3.1a1pre

Comment 9

[Bob Kirby]

The problem is still there in Thunderbird 3.1.6. For use in Thunderbird it is a nasty irritant as you cannot use mail groups to organise your contacts without giving them all dummy e-mail addresses. That is a messy work-around, as it is time consuming, it becomes harder to check for contacts with missing e-mail addresses, and you also have to suffer 'recipient not found' mails unless you use two groups, one for those with genuine e-mail addresses and one for those with dummy addresses. For use with mailmerge or label printing clients such as OpenOffice 3.2.1 (which allows you to select a Thunderbird mail group as your data source) the issue becomes a potential showstopper, as you may want to echo your customer's e-mail details back to them on any letters, so that they can check they are correct.

Comment 10

[Bob Kirby]

(In reply to comment #9)
Just to be clear. Contacts without e-mail addresses are excluded from the list of available contacts when entering a new mailing group member under group properties. So this problem does not only apply to drag and drop.

Comment 13

[kst]

The same problem has been reported under Bug 282841, eg my comments 25 and 31 - but ist is not yet resolved

Comment 14

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to kst from comment #13)
> The same problem has been reported under Bug 282841, eg my comments 25 and
> 31 - but ist is not yet resolved

To avoid confusion: Bug 282841 is different from this bug:
- Bug 282841 is about dragging cards into the open window of the Mailing List Properties dialogue
- whereas this bug 248786 is about dragging cards onto a closed mailing list item in AB 3-pane.
Hence, bug 282841 comment 25 and bug 282841 comment 31 are off-topic in that bug, as they belong here (Bug 248786).

Comment 15

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I believe the following datalossy scenario (frequently causing confusion in other bugs like Bug 520017) is covered by this bug (please correct me if I'm wrong):

Dragging a selection of multiple contacts onto closed Mailing List item succeeds only for seemingly random number of contacts, while other contacts are not added (the contact without email address and all subsequent contacts of selection)

STR

- create Address book "AB1"
- add the following cards to "AB1"
Display name <email address>
user1 <[e-mail]>
user2 <[e-mail]>
user3 <> (leave email address field blank)
user4 <[e-mail]>
- create New List "List1" in AB1 without adding contacts
- click AB1 twisty to show List1 in address book's "folder" pane
- Select user1, user2, user3 and user4 using click/ctrl+click/shift-click (ensure not to select List1)
- drag 4 selected contacts from AB1 right pane onto List1 in left pane

Actual result:
- only user1 and user2 are added to List1 (because drag & drop fails for user3 without email address - this bug -, and any subsequent contacts like user4)

Expected result:
- add all selected users to List1

That problem is especially nasty for large numbers of contacts, where users can be very confused say if 63 out of 100 contacts are copied and the rest is skipped without apparent reason (which I think is what happened in Bug 520017).

Comment 16

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Thomas D. from comment #15)
> Actual result:
> - only user1 and user2 are added to List1 (because drag & drop fails for
> user3 without email address - this bug -, and any subsequent contacts like
> user4)

Actually, it's worse than that:

Actual result:

- in AB view, List1 shows that only user1 and user2 have been added to List1 (so it *looks* as if user3 without email address and all subsequent contacts like user4 have not been added)
- but double-click on List1 to open List1 properties shows something different:
it *looks* as if user1, user2, (blank contact), *and user3* have been added to List1
That undefined status where you don't know which contacts are *really* in your list seems to persist in the current AB or TB session.

To complete the confusion, after restarting TB, both AB view *and* properties dialogue of List1 will now show... drums...
- only the truncated List of user1 and user2 which ends at the first contact without email address (user3).

Omg! No wonder users are getting confused...

Comment 17

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Cards without email address really cause havoc for Mailing Lists, as reported in comment 15, comment 16. The actual content of a mailing list becomes totally unpredictable. I think I even saw hidden contacts (from another AB?) suddenly surfacing, and it's all but impossible to add all existing contacts to a list unless all of them are entirely well-formed and do not contain any empty email addresses -> critical

Comment 18

[Vincent (caméléon)]

note that all the comments here are quite useless because the address book will soon have a complete rewrite (project code name at this time: "Ensemble"). So we should just take care that this rewrite allows a better handling of mailing lists.
I don't think anyone will work on improving the current address book.

See: http://mikeconley.ca/blog/tag/ensemble/

Comment 21

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Thomas D. from comment #16)
> (In reply to Thomas D. from comment #15)
> That undefined status where you don't know which contacts are *really* in
> your list seems to persist in the current AB or TB session.
> Omg! No wonder users are getting confused...

Same observation in duplicate Bug 520017 Comment 0:

> I am trying to populate mailing lists, by copying chunks of contacts from
> the address book. It seems the number of contacts that the lists will
> *display* gets limited (on my computer to 91, on the other to 89) despite
> moving more contacts.
> - In the *address book view*, the status bar indicates the
> number of contacts as above, and these are the only ones to display.
> - But when the *list properties* is opened, it seems to contain more contacts,
> possibly all the contacts moved.

Comment 22

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Vincent (caméléon) from comment #18)
> note that all the comments here are quite useless because the address book
> will soon have a complete rewrite (project code name at this time:
> "Ensemble"). So we should just take care that this rewrite allows a better
> handling of mailing lists.
> I don't think anyone will work on improving the current address book.
> 
> See: http://mikeconley.ca/blog/tag/ensemble/

Sure, I am aware of that. However, I don't believe in that assumption of "soon" until that day when the new AB will actually have landed in TB with at least the same featureset that we have now.

In the meantime, our existing users are going mad with a severely flawed AB, and we'll continue to get bugs which we'll have to deal with somehow, if only to understand the current problems better and point out workarounds until the new AB lands.

Exposing those bugs also proves that Mozilla's promise of continued "security and stability" for TB (while withdrawing the manpower to achieve that) is simply an empty promise.

Given that nobody knows when the new AB will *really* land (and add to that the prolonged release cycle), IMHO it would still be worth trying to address some of the existing bugs before that, especially where the cost-benefit-ratio is good. As an example, Bug 628035 probably just needs a single extra call of a list view refresh to avoid dataloss of contacts when users try to delete ghost entries. This bug 248786 may or may not be another example, depending on the difficulty of fixing it, which I can't estimate.

Comment 23

[Alexander Bergmann]

This bug is still alive in Thunderbird 31.0:

1) Create a few contacts A <[e-mail]>, B <[e-mail]>, C <> and D <[e-mail]>
2) Create a new mailing list
3) Add the contacts to the mailing list by drag & drop

Only contacts A and B are displayed as members of the mailing list!

However, if you compose a new message with the mailing list in the To field, a new message is created with contacts A, B and D in the To field.

But after a restart of Thunderbird: If you compose a new message with the mailing list in the To field, a new message is created with contacts A and B in the To field.

Comment 24

[Ian Eales]

31.4 - dragging a contact without an email address onto a mail list prevents any further additions to the list. The only option is to delete the list completely and start over.

Comment 25

[[e-mail]]

See comments on Bug 1172440 - this appears to be the same issue. - comment repeated here:
I have experienced this exact bug on Windows-7 OS, running Thunderbird version 38.2.2
It is also a duplicate of Bug 248786 -- these should be worked together, I suggest.
I could not find a way/place to make a suggestion elsewhere,
So I suggest here that a nicer way to handle it would be:
1- If the candidate to be added to an email-List has no address, accept it anyways
2- When actually SENDing via the List, ignore any members without email
3- Also, do a quick ping-test or something to verify ALL List-members' email address is valid and ignore (don't send) if invalid, so no recurring 'address not found but will retry forever' messages.
I am using the List as a way to categorized my contacts, NOT a an actual email list - perhaps it could be made to have that additional feature, or just make the email-list accept no-email-address contacts as suggested. Either way, it is annoying.
In addition, I noticed that the List DOES have the new member, if you right-click it to view the manual-entry list (confirmed) - but it does not show otherwise. I had to delete the entire List to get it working again (confirmed). A workaround is to put fake email addresses on all the empty-contacts BEFORE dragging them onto a List. It is also possible at that point to remove the fake addresses, once they get onto the List, but this is tedious.

Comment 26

[Alexander Bergmann]

I cannot reproduce this problem as described in my comment #23 anymore in Thunderbird 68.1.1.

Adding the contacts A, B, C, and D to the mailing list works. A, B and D are shown as members of the mailing lists and a new message can be created with the contacts A, B and D in the To field. Also modifying the mailing list afterwards does work now, too.

However, I found another problem with mailing lists, see: Bug 1584211