471580 - Wrong address book is used after setting Shredder to collect the addresses from outgoing mail into the 'Collected' address book

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[Valery Kondakoff]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2) Gecko/20081201 Firefox/3.1b2 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20081228 Shredder/3.0b2pre

I have set TB to collect the addresses from outgoing mail into the 'Collected' address book. This works pretty well, but now I noticed, that when I'm using 'Add to Address Book' mouse right click menu item, or just clicking with my mouse on a yellow star (to the right from the e-mail address) the contact is added to 'Collected' address book as well, instead of being added to the Personal address book. Thus, I'm forced to move addresses to the Personal ab manually.

Here is the discussion and confirmation for this bug: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=1014495

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Select Tools-Options-Composition-Addressing-Automatically add outgoing addresses to my... And set it to 'Collected Addresses'.
2. Select a message and use 'Add to Address Book' mouse right click menu item

Actual Results:  
The contact is added to 'Collected' AB, instead of Personal.

Expected Results:  
The 'Collected' AB was designed to automatically collect outgoing addresses, and 'Personal' AB is the default address book and it should be the default address book when user is explicitly saving a contact.

Comment 1

[Aaron Lawrence]

What is "Shredder"???
Anyway apart from that, confirming as per oorwullie in the forum.

Comment 2

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> What is "Shredder"???
> Anyway apart from that, confirming as per oorwullie in the forum.

If you don't know what the bug is talking about *PLEASE* don't confirm it.

I'm guessing this is a consequence of the second patch of bug 450724 ("implement immediate add"). Standard8, thoughts?

Comment 3

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Just using the same address book as for collected addresses was a concious decision. We did this so that we wouldn't need an intermediate dialog, and re-using the collected address book (which is essentially what you are doing when clicking on a star - collecting the address), seemed the most logical.

Bug 456167 is also related.

cc'ing Bryan for comment.

Comment 4

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Then we should be able to select the address book when we click the second time (edit contact) on the star. FF shows then also the Bookmarks folders.

Comment 5

[Glen Carreras]

Yes, I think that most people would logically want to add the address to their personal address book.  The tool-tip dialog even says "add to address book" which to me implies the main address book.

For me, the "collected addresses" is more like a junk folder of addresses that I don't want cluttering up my main address book. When I consciously add an address, it is usually one that I want to keep permanently. I would suggest that the default be changed to the "personal address book" if there is not going to be a dialog provided.

Comment 6

[Aaron Lawrence]

Of course one doesn't want an intermediate dialog for a quick-access feature. However, why can't the default "Personal Address Book" be identified?

Comment 7

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

This bug doesn't belong in General. Moving to Address Book but I'm not sure it doesn't belong in Mail Window Front End, or maybe in the MailNews Core product.

In reply to comment #1: Shredder is the code name for Thunderbird trunk builds (currently 3.0 beta).

Happy New Year! (Mozilla time is still 2008 but I'm in 2009 :-) ).

Comment 8

[Nomis101]

I also would find it usefull to be able to choose the address book if I add I new email address (e.g. when clicking on a star). Personally I have all my email addresses only in the Mac OS X system addressbook. But to be able to add a new address (e.g. when clicking on a star) to the Mac OS X system addressbook, Bug 391057 must be fixed first...

Comment 9

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

This is a bit of a problem we faced when first putting this together.  We want to be able to add a contact to your address book such that it's usable from the compose area.  However a person can have multiple local address books with none of them being a default for adding addresses into.  The Collected Address Book is the only one that has a preference for being the default for "automatically" adding addresses and so it was the only logical place we could rely on adding contacts to.

The only other option is to start adding extra steps to the star process (not really an acceptable one) or more knobs to the star popup such that a contact can be moved into a different address book than the default collected.  I think the latter is the most reasonable way forward, however there will need to be a bit of work to make sure the address book selection doesn't clutter the currently simple dialog.

Comment 10

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Bryan, one other idea I had was to make it so that when you right-click and get the context menu, then select add to address book there, we could bring up a dialog with an address book selection popup.

We could additionally change the tooltip for the star to be a bit more specific e.g. "Collect Address" or something.

Comment 12

[Mitra Ardron]

xref Bug 456167 which is almost the same problem.

Comment 13

[Karel Koubek]

I've recently upgraded from TB 2 to TB 3.1 and noticed this bug. Bryan, could you please explain a bit, why it's a problem to have the "old" Thunderbird behavior, i.e. use "Collected Addresses" for all reply-to contacts as a sort of junk contact list (contacts where I had allowed to download remote content could go there too - I don't know how they are managed right now) and the "Personal Address book" use as default list when I use the "star" icon?

Am I right that Thunderbird 2 used Personal Address Book as the default contact list out-of-the-box and now Thunderbird 3+ uses the "Collected Addresses" instead? Isn't it against any reasonable logic? General users that don't care about technical details will now have their contacts scattered across two place, great... Correct me if I'm wrong, but otherwise this was very bad decision IMHO. Unless you tout it as a feature - "Look, now you have your old contacts from the old Thunderbird 2 days nicely separated from the new ones! Isn't it great!" - sorry for being a bit sarcastic ;-)

If I could propose a solution, obviously switching the star contact addition dialog defaulting back to the Personal Address Book would be great, but could hurt some users not in the know. If not possible, what about adding a new drop-down box in Options > Composition > Addressing > "When manually adding contact, place it into:"

I know I'm late to the game and that I'm probably spamming this bug with my lengthy post, but the current situation is a bit unfortunate. Thanks for your reply.

Comment 14

[Shriram (irc: Mavericks)]

Is this an issue with TB 7.01?

Comment 15

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

UX issue?

Comment 16

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #15)

UX issue?

No more, for the most part.

• Click on star of address in message reader's header adds to "Personal Address Book".
• Contextual Add to Address Book does the same.
• Double-click on star works pretty well to immediately open the edit dialog and choose another AB for the just added contact if you so wish. Opening the edit dialog every time (like when adding a FF bookmark) would probably be overkill.

That said, we should offer a choice in Preferences into which AB user-added addresses should go by default (as we do for Collected Addresses). Enterprise users will probably not be happy with all of their manually added contacts ending up in Personal AB.

Comment 17

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Resolved WFM per my comment 16.
Filed followup bug 1735630.