654744 - Add confirmation/warning that deleting AB contact entries will also remove them from mailing lists

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[Ulf Zibis]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110420 Firefox/3.6.17
Build Identifier: 3.1.10

Often I have duplicates in the address book. I can't see, which one of them is assigned to a mailing list.
So when I try to delete one of them manually, I would be happy, if there would be a warning, if the item is listed in one of the mailing lists to avoid destruction of the mailing list.
Additionally a flag on each email item in the address book, which is listed in a mailing list, would be helpful, ideally showing the name(s) of the list(s) as a tool-tip on mouse hover. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. open address book
2. select a duplicate entry
3. click delete

Actual Results:  
1. entry is silently deleted in assigned mailing list
2. no info about assignment to existing mailing list

Expected Results:  
1. if entry is assigned to a mailing list, there should occur a warning about with choice to cancel the delete action
2. there should be a flag, indicating the assignment to existing mailing list
3. on mouse-hover over the flag, a tool-tip should show the name(s) of the list(s)

Comment 1

[Ulf Zibis]

Don't forget to check the same factor when context menu on email item in email header view is invoked to delete an address.

Comment 2

[Ulf Zibis]

Increasing priority, because of silent dataloss.
In fact, the risk of silently lost entries in TB's mailing lists, prevented me to use this feature at all in the past. I instead always composed lists manually in the email header, and after I re-used that email for different postings.

Please make TB's mailing list feature usable without risk.

Currently, the developer of ThunderPlunger addon has implemented that warning in his new beta version, but I believe, this "seat belt" should be implemented in TB itself.

Comment 3

[Ulf Zibis]

Attachment: Warning dialogue as example, provided by ThunderPlunger addon

See the new warning from ThunderPlunger addon.

IMHO, such a warning should not be left on the responsibility of an arbitrary addon, as there are likely more addons, e.g. 'Duplicates Contact Manager', + the build-in address book functions which potentially can cause this dataloss.

Comment 4

[Blake Winton (:bwinton) (:☕️)]

Comment on attachment 571494 [details]
Warning dialogue as example, provided by ThunderPlunger addon

I think the idea behind this is a good one, although I'm not a fan of the "==>", or the "(s)", and I wonder how well it will scale if there are a lot of addresses, or if the addresses are used in multiple mailing lists.

Still, other than those concerns, ui-r=me.  ;)

Comment 5

[David von Oheimb]

I support Ulf's proposal. Here is a further proposal:
When displaying a card/entry, automatically show to which list(s) it belongs.

Comment 6

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

confirming per Blake's comment 4

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Ulf, if you want to move this forward, please provide ideas for making the suggested confirmation dialogue scalable for lots of deleted contacts, and/or contacts that are part of many mailing lists (per comment 4).

Comment 8

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to David von Oheimb from comment #5)
> I support Ulf's proposal. Here is a further proposal:
> When displaying a card/entry, automatically show to which list(s) it belongs.

That needs a separate bug if there isn't one yet.

Comment 9

[Ulf Zibis]

(In reply to Thomas D. from comment #7)
> Ulf, if you want to move this forward, please provide ideas...

The list of collisions should be limited by 20 items. If more, add one of the following phrases:
..... Additional cards/lists were found but are not shown here due to lack of space.
..... too much cards/lists are affected to list them all here
..... more cards/lists are affected but not listed here
..... more cards/lists are affected but not shown
..... 123 more cards/lists are affected but not shown here
(Note: the last one requires iteration through the whole address book.)

If a card is listed in many mailing lists, there should not be listed more than 5 references per card, so in case of many cards, selected for deletion, user will see, if there are more cards affected.

In contrast to attachment 1 [details] [diff] [review], separate the warning message part from the question part
by the items list, so the relation of the [OK]..[Cancel] buttons are clearly related to the question part.
Check out the corner cases with current ThunderPlunger Add-on to see how it works.
But: Instead of the question icon, there should be better the warning icon in the dialogue.

Comment 10

[David von Oheimb]

Thanks Thomas for your comments. As you suggested, I looked if there is a separate bug related to the suggestion (on displaying list membership) I made, and since I did not find any, I filed new bug 756840.

Comment 11

[Ulf Zibis]

Oops, wrong link. Correction:
attachment 571494 [details]

Comment 12

[Ulf Zibis]

(In reply to David von Oheimb from comment #10)
> ... and since I did not find any, I filed new bug 756840.

Thanks David! I just was in start to do the same.

Comment 13

[Ulf Zibis]

Depends on bug 756840, because function to collect mailing list references for one card could be reused.

Comment 14

[Ulf Zibis]

(In reply to Wayne Mery <[e-mail]> from last change)
Hey, why you remove the keywords?
Destroying a mailing list is data loss.
A common case is, that one has duplicates of a email address in the contacts list. When removing the wrong one, it will be deleted too from the mailing list without warning.

Comment 15

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Perhaps the real issue to be addressed, is why are there duplicates?

Regardless, given in this scenario that you intentionally delete the contact, I don't think this qualifies as dataloss. It's not Thunderbird's job to ensure that you don't delete the "wrong one". Also, in version 102 you must explicitly acknowledge a delete prompt dialog.

Comment 16

[Ulf Zibis]

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

It's not Thunderbird's job to ensure that you don't delete the "wrong one".

But it's impossible for the user to decide, which is the right/wrong one, because of bug 756840

Also, in version 102 you must explicitly acknowledge a delete prompt dialog.

Does this dialogue also warn about a list membership?

Comment 17

[Ulf Zibis]

(In reply to Ulf Zibis from comment #16)

But it's impossible for the user to decide, which is the right/wrong one, because of bug 756840

And it presumes, that the user always remembers a potential list membership.