305700 - MAB format should be replaced with VCARD or an XML format or both

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 278072

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[silcndude]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050730 Firefox/1.0.6 (Debian package 1.0.6-2)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050730 Firefox/1.0.6 (Debian package 1.0.6-2)

Rationale:  Thunderbird is a quite satisfactory mail client with the exception
of its terribly buggy and feature-weak address book component.  (I won't go into
details.. the existing bug reports cover most of the problems I've found
myself.)   In my opinion, this component is ripe for a heavy overhaul.  At the
center of the problems is the outdated MAB (Mozilla Address Book) file format,
which seems to constrain new feature development and provide a regular source of
bugs.  (I've had numerous corruption issues)  So my thought: why not switch to a
clean, human-readable, extensible format and get rid of MAB once and for all. 
KMail and Evolution use VCARD for actual contact data plus custom formats for
groups and lists.  Even better would be a straight XML schema or maybe XML +
VCARD. (using XML for groups/lists/etc.)  In the interest of standards and
compatibility, perhaps all the major Open Source desktop mail client projects
could get together and agree on a common schema.  This would go a long ways
towards data sharing between apps, including non-mail-related apps.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

There are plans to replace it, but it won't be in a human readable format. See
<http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla2:Unified_Storage>

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 278072 ***