267877 - Collected Address Book saves its cards in Personal Address Book

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[Mike Fedyk]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: TB 0.9 (20041103)

On an install of TB and a new profile the automatically collected address cards
are going into Personal Address Book.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Cards are saved in Personal Address Book.

Expected Results:  
Cards should be saved in Collected Address Book.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

tools | options |advanced | automatically add ougoing e-mail addresses to my:...
lets you pick the destination.

Comment 2

[Mike Fedyk]

Yes but it is a bad default setting.  Why should collected address cards go into
the "Personal Address Book" and leave the "Collected Address Book" empty on a
default install.  I have a lot of users who have empty collected address books
and don't know how to change the setting even if you show them.

I am reopening this bug this once.  If you still feel it is invalid then go
ahead and mark it again.  But it doesn't make much sense to put collected
address in personal...

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

did you migrate from 4.x or Mozilla 1.x or Netscape 6/7.x?  If it was a fresh
tbird profile, I don't think there would be any collected address book, so there
wouldn't be any confusion (if there is, then that's a bug)... I believe even
Mozilla 1.x didn't create a collected address book by default. As I said
elsewhere, the collected address book has been deprecated, in favor of putting
everything in the personal address book. That's not a decision I can reverse...

Comment 4

[Mike Fedyk]

I have a profile that has been used with a few older versions of TB, but I went
to the TB profile manager and created a new profile, and the collected address
book was in that fresh profile.

You can change this bug to be for that if you like..

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

that's definitely a bug - thanks, Mike!

Comment 6

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Attachment: Change default preference for collected addresses to collected address book

This patch modifies the default preference for collected addresses to the
collected address book (I had a look back and it seems like it was set to PAB
from when the pref was first created, couldn't find a specific reason.

Are we happy that the whitelist address book for junk mail still defaults to
the personal address book?

Comment 7

[David :Bienvenu]

We want it to be the personal address book by default - that was a conscious
decision. We felt it was easier to just have one address book. 

Comment 8

[Scott MacGregor]

Comment on attachment 173393 [details] [diff] [review]
Change default preference for collected addresses to collected address book

we don't use the cab anymore. We intentionally put things in the PAB now and
have for several years. 

This bug should be won't fixed.

Comment 9

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Comment on attachment 173393 [details] [diff] [review]
Change default preference for collected addresses to collected address book

Ok, sorry about that. I'm happy to wont fix this bug, but I think we should
really be not creating the CAB on startup as it's confusing (which re-reading
the bug I think that's what David was saying).

In which case, mailnews already has bug 197138 for stopping the CAB being
automatically created, if I took that bug and implemented it for mailnews and
tb (probably after 1.8) would you be happy with that? would you want to leave
this bug open as the tb version?

Comment 10

[David :Bienvenu]

sorry, I should have been more clear - like you say, the bug is that the
history.mab is created at all...

Comment 11

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I'm not going to be looking at this one for the forseable future, reassigning 
to default owner.

Comment 12

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz] (OOO: back Aug 26)]

*** Bug 322442 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to comment #8)
> (From update of attachment 173393 [details] [diff] [review] [edit])
> we don't use the cab anymore. We intentionally put things in the PAB now and
> have for several years. 
> 
> This bug should be won't fixed.
> 
Based on conversations on IRC and via various bug comments, I'm WONTFIXing this bug. 

Comment 14

[Bill Dimm]

This will probably fall on deaf ears, but I just want to point out that if the Collected Address Book isn't going to work (by default) the way people expect it to, then it would be a lot better to remove it instead of leaving it laying around like a land mine.

If someone searches for "thunderbird whitelist" on Google, they can easily come across tutorials like this one:
http://www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/email/thunderbird/junk.html
that talk about using "Collected Addresses" to whitelist everyone you've emailed.  I diligently went through the Junk Settings for each of my email accounts and selected "Collected Addresses," thinking that was the most aggressive setting.  What I didn't realize was that my "Collected Addresses" was empty, so my whitelisting was the exact opposite of what I expected.  How did I find out that I had a problem?  One of my workers, who telecommutes, sent me an email saying her husband had died.  Fortunately, I noticed it in the Junk folder, even though I thought it was impossible for it to end up there since I email her daily.  How embarrassing would it have been if I hadn't noticed it and sent my condolences?

The user simply shouldn't be given the option to select the CAB as the whitelist if the CAB isn't configured to actually work.  Removing a feature that is no longer useful is OK, but keeping it lingering around with dramatically different behavior than people expect based on the behavior of previous versions is dangerous.