330320 - Restart using "Collected Addresses" AB for collected addresses

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

A while back, we stopped using a Collected Addresses address book for auto-collected addresses, and started putting them directly in the user's default Personal Address Book. See Bug 267877, comment #7.

We should reverse this decision, and start putting them in a separate address book again, for the following reasons:

- Syncing. You don't want to sync the unified address book with your PDA or phone, because it contains the addresses of a large number of people you barely know. Phones and PDAs have limited memory, and interfaces where each character typed is an effort. With two books, you could just sync the PAB and leave Collected Addresses behind.

- Security. The address book is now used as a whitelist for the spam filter and remote image display. Having lots of people you don't know in it reduces the usefulness and safety of this. With two books, you can have it so only people you explicitly add are whitelisted.

As Dan says in bug 303754:

"Effectively the current setting is "load remote content from anyone who claims to be anyone I've ever mailed in my life". That's a rather low bar considering that everyone has at some point CC'd themselves by reply-all'ing to a mail thread. An evil-doer setting From = To would have great success."

- Rule of Least Surprise. If I have a paper address book, the only people who are in it are people I put there because I want them there. The electronic equivalent should be the same. If we are collecting addresses for some purpose like helping autocomplete, the fact that this store is implemented as an address book is an implementation detail, and shouldn't impinge upon the default user understanding of what an address book is.

This change may have UI ramifications in terms of how users add addresses to the Personal Address Book. For example, we may want to keep track of how many times a user emails a person, and move the address to the PAB when the number hits (e.g.) 20. But those would be separate bugs.

Related bugs: bug 267877, bug 322442, bug 303754.

Gerv

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I'm inclined to agree with Gerv. However, there are some things I think we should do as well.

1) Allow users to delete/rename their PAB & Collected Addresses

- We're frequently being asked for this.

2) educate or restrict users in the appropriate dialogs so that they are warned not to/prevented from setting the whitelist address book to the collected address book.

Also, IMHO (as per bug 303754), we must still make the preference for allowing a whiltelisted address book to be off by default - it must be a decision by the user to turn it on.

Comment 2

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

From what I know so far, this seems to me as though it's the right thing to do.

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

bienvenu, mscott: are either of you able to make this happen?

Gerv

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

CCing David Ascher. See comment #0 :-)

Gerv

Comment 5

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Just an additional comment, as we're currently looking at restructing the address book APIs at the moment, I'm hoping that we're also going to revise the prefs backend. This would be a good time to examine our Personal & Collected ABs and the default setup to decide what we really want.

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Mark: what's the latest thinking here?

Gerv

Comment 7

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Mark: what's the latest thinking here?

The super solution that has been discussed in the past would be to have one address book and the entries get tagged as they go in/get modified, so you'd have tags like "collected", "confirmed", and we'd progress along the different tags as the entry was edited etc.

However I think that's not going to happen for TB 3. Either we have to change to one address book, or we have to move the pref back.

Changing to one address book by default may be slightly hard as it means we'd have to migrate prefs in some way (we can't just delete the existing defaults for the collected address book).

Assigning to Bryan (our User experience guy) for some comment on what he thinks we should do.

Comment 8

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Attachment: Restart using collected addresses

In this patch I'm proposing that we reset the default for collecting addresses to the "Collected Addresses" book.

Reasoning:

- Generally I think that we're not going to be doing any major rewrite of the address book for Thunderbird 3, or something that would fix the two address books by default issue.
- If we've got two address books by default, then it seems to make sense that we collect addresses to the one named "Collected"
- Whitelists are now per-AB or per-Contact, so that isn't too much of an issue, but does mean users may think twice about whitelisting addresses in the collected address book.
- We need to do something different for collecting addresses in the next version of Thunderbird.

Comment 9

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Comment on attachment 366770 [details] [diff] [review]
Restart using collected addresses

Karsten, are you happy with this for SeaMonkey as well, if not, I'll move the change into all-thunderbird.js.

David, just an sr as normal ;-)

Comment 10

[David :Bienvenu]

Comment on attachment 366770 [details] [diff] [review]
Restart using collected addresses

yay!

Comment 11

[Karsten Düsterloh]

Comment on attachment 366770 [details] [diff] [review]
Restart using collected addresses

(In reply to comment #0)
> A while back, we stopped using a Collected Addresses address book for
> auto-collected addresses

I, personally, never made that move, I'm still using history.mab. :)
So, yay!

Comment 12

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Checked in: http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/6c2545a40b12