290985 - Address book import from Eudora gives VERY incorrect Thunderbird address book

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(MailNews Core :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[Patrice Roy]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414

Eudora allows entries in the address book which refer to other entries. I
personally use this feature to create lists of my students' addresses without
actually duplicating email addresses all over the place.

The only reason stopping me from using Thunderbird (or Mozilla Mail) is that my
Eudora address book is significantly big (130 Ko nndbase.txt file) and involves
many such constructs (en entry for each student, with email and other info; an
entry per groupe of students, in which I use the alias for each student which
Eudora uses to find the correct email addresses when I send mail to the group;
sometimes a third level of indirection too). Importing my address book from
Eudora to Thunderbird gives an unusable Thunderbird address book that makes no
sense and does not contain the proper entries, be they individual entries or
group entries involving indirections.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Email me at [e-mail] and I'll send you back an example address book
(please excuse me for not putting it on a Web site or something, but it includes
personal info...). I use Eudora 6.2 at the moment.

Actual Results:  
Importing that address book into Thunderbird will give a wildly incorrect
address book.

Expected Results:  
Contain the same entries as the original address book.

Nope.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Tested with address book Patrice sent me.  Multiple problems perhaps. I don't see any duplicate or related import bugs.  (but there are some reports in the mozillazine forums)

I don't know anything about TB import so take this with a grain of salt:

* 13 TB lists created with no name
* many TB lists where TB displays no address entries
* Eudora entries with two email addresses changed in TB to a list instead of one entry with an alternate email address
* at least one example (name Bibeau) where entry became Four in TB, two with first name as display name and lastname put in email field, and two with address and no name

2 screen shots next to show some examples - these show the Eudora and TB address book entries and also the text file. both shots are examples of the last two items above

Notes about the data in eudora:
* approx 2,000 names and lists
* many without email address
* many without name (first or last or missing both)
* many missing both name and email (only nickname)
* I don't know if there are any lists of lists (which might involve bug 133459).

Too much data - may need reduced testcase from Patrice.
Patrice - you might try http://www.joshie.com/projects/dawn/ as a workaround.
Over to Mark.

tested with version 1.6a1 (20060119) and 1.5

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Attachment: name - example 1

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Attachment: name - example 2

Comment 4

[Patrice Roy]

Thanks to «[e-mail]» for all the work he/she did so far.


I'd be willing to submit a test case of reduced size. Any parameters as to what you would like me to remove, such that the reduced size address book is meaningful to your investigations?


If things don't work well, I'll follow your advice and check out Dawn.


Thanks again for all the nice work!

Comment 5

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Thanks to «[e-mail]» for all the work he/she did so far.

Yes I agree, very useful.

> I'd be willing to submit a test case of reduced size. Any parameters as to what
> you would like me to remove, such that the reduced size address book is
> meaningful to your investigations?

I'd like to look at it, but due to the fact that I don't have Eudora available to me, I can't easily go through the code and try things out. So I can look at various problems and try to work out a solution, but I'll need someone to be able to test nightly builds for me.

What would really help me in the first instance is to have a very small address book with just cards in it e.g.

Card 1) First/Last Name, email address
Card 2) First/Last Name, email address + additional email address
Card 3) Full Card details with one address.

If there are various instances where different email addresses seem not to be handled correctly, e.g. a@b.c is created correctly whereas a_b@c.d isn't, that would be useful as well.

In each instance, I'll need to know what the mozilla address book does/doesn't do with each card.

Once we've got the basics there sorted out, then we can look at lists.

I'm not looking to get all the basic test cases initially. Just some simple pointers as to what may be going wrong where. Hopefully that won't be too much work for one of you people.

btw I'm moving this to core address book as I expect the same problems will be in SeaMonkey as it is common code.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I agree - I suggest just the two names I provided in the screen shots. Patrice if you can create a eudora address book or text file that has both address cards and list that contain only those names then we can hit those first. Mail it to me as before.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Attachment: Eudora address book with 2 names and one list, and TB export

Testcase includes export of thunderbird data, after the import of eudora data.  Problem is result of non-ascii characters.

Some, or all of the behavior of Patrick's data is dup of bug 254118 (opened in 2004 but not yet marked confirmed).

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Patrice, see comments in Bug 117236 

Comment 9

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I've not really got the time or tools to look at this at the moment, so reassigning to default. Hopefully the Penelope work may fix this up.

Comment 10

[Geoffrey C. Wenger]

Haven't looked at this at all yet, but it looks up my alley.

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

the other Eudora import bugs:
bug 534800
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?type1-0-0=anywordssubstr&value2-0-1=address&short_desc=eudora&field0-0-0=short_desc&value2-0-0=address&type1-0-1=substring&field2-0-0=short_desc&value1-0-1=import&resolution=---&classification=Client%20Software&classification=Components&type2-0-0=substring&query_format=advanced&type2-0-1=substring&value1-0-0=import&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&type0-0-0=nowordssubstr&value0-0-0=count%20counts%20vcard&field1-0-0=short_desc&product=MailNews%20Core&product=Thunderbird&field2-0-1=component&field1-0-1=component

Comment 12

[:aceman]

Importing from Eudora was removed from Thunderbird in bug 1243498.
Please see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_from_Eudora_-_Thunderbird on how you can still import from Eudora if you need that.