383427 - Relational Address Book

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 382876

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[Harkirat Singh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Build Identifier: Thunderbird 3.0

Thunderbird 3 needs to evolve from being just an email client to being a Personal Information Management tool. Even though it currently has a lot of features that are great, it does lack in the field of managing an effective address book. I would like to propose a feature in the TB address book, that I have been pondering over for a long time. I call this a Relational Address Book (RAB). 

Let me use a few examples to illustrate some the things RAB should be able to do:
 
Example 1:
Let us assume that a user maintains his/her address book that is complete with most of the details such as full contact names, email addresses, mailing addresses, departments, designations, company, dates of birth, dates of anniversary etc. Now, when the user starts typing multiple addresses in the address line, TB3 will notice that the first two addresses are to the same domain, for example, mozilla.org. Now, TB3 can open some kind of a drop down menu that says "this is the list of other contacts from the domain 'mozilla.org', please select the contacts you would like to add. The user can then check the boxes of the contacts he/she wants to add, or simply move to the next line. 

Example 2:
A user enters the same date of anniversary for two separate contacts. The RAB will ask the user if the two contacts are in fact related (married)? If the user responds with a yes, the address book links the two contacts using specific fields such as "Related to: <address book ID>" and "Relation Type: Spouse" The "Relation Type" field can have the following classifications: 
- Spouse
- Parent
- Friend
- Sibling
- Offspring or Son/Daughter (I am just trying to be politically correct and avoiding a gender specific entry)
The users can obivously enter this data on their own without being prompted for it. But the RAB can use this data  by integrating it with Lightning or Sunbird, and adding the relevant dates as reminders. This implies that instead of showing two separate entries in the calendar that say something like "John Smith's Anniversary" and "Jane Smith's Anniversary", it will automatically say "John Smith and Jane Smith's Anniversary". Another useful feature of adding the "Related to:" fields is that TB3 will be able to identify when a user is sending a mail to let's say two people of the same family, and can prompt the user with the addresses of other people of the same family as described in example 1.

Example 3 (IM Integration):
More often than not, people have multiple IM accounts on AIM, GTalk, MSN(!), Yahoo(!!!?), Skype, and Jabber. The RAB should be able to retieve the messenger contact list from all the accounts that a user specifies and then allow the user to sort the contacts as per the contact name. For example, a contact has three aliases on Yahoo, one MSN ID, one Gtalk ID, and two AIM IDs. In such a scenario, the RAB will allow the user to associate all these IDs with that Contact, and update the respective address books in yahoo, MSN, AOL, Google etc. with complete user information. Another thought that comes to mind at this time is that we could allow TB3 to launch the relvant IM app when the user double clicks on an IM contact.

Apart from this there are a lot more possibilities that I am sure other people can think of, I will update other features as and when I have the time to type them out.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Dropping "Feature Request:" from title. Severity = enhancement does the same thing in a better way.

Comment 2

[Harkirat Singh]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Dropping "Feature Request:" from title. Severity = enhancement does the same
> thing in a better way.
> 

Thanks Mark... I hadn't noticed the Severity = Enhancement until much later and by then I had forgotten that I was duplicating it in the Title... 

Comment 3

[Giles Weaver]

Is this going to be implemented?
With all the addresses, phone numbers and screen names people have these days I think an improved address book is essential to the success of Thunderbird.

Why not implement the address book in SQLite so that this data can easily be stored, and queried with a search/filter tool?