address book lists

[willi.uebelherr]

Dear friends,

maybe, this discussion exist in any thread. Then please, give me the link.

We have, in part, a tree structure in the address book. The higher layer "address book" and the lower layer, the different address lists, the single address books.

Now, i use circa 16 different address books for different languages and different countries. Inside of an address book, i can create lists. But it is not possible, to create a list on the upper layer and to use different addresses from the different books without to copy the entry.

If i select the entry "address book", then i get a list of all entries from the different lower address books. But this is not a real tree stucture.

In the german Tb forum the friends referred me to the English forum. They have no answer and no idea. And they don't know the state in the development of the Tb address book.

Please, can you tell me, where i can discuss this questions?

many greetings, willi
Coro, Venezuela
(email removed)

[edit]email removed. No email support is available here but heaps of hungry harvesting robots. LIMPET235 (Moderator)[/edit]

[LIMPET235]

Moving this to the Thunderbird Support forum...

[tanstaafl]

They recently added a "all address books" layer above the individual address books (personal, collected addresses etc.) . Ignore that as it doesn't really change anything. It does not support nesting a address book within another address book for example.

Thunderbird doesn't support nested mailing lists. That is, you can't include the name of a mailing list within another mailing list. Another limitation of mailing lists is that they can only use contacts that are in the same address book that the mailing list is. Why? Probably because that is the way it was originally designed for Netscape Communicator back in 1997, and it didn't change much when some of it was rewritten for Mozilla Suite in 1998, whose mail/news code was ported to Thunderbird.

There was a recent effort to completely change the architecture of the address book but its stalled due to lack of resources. No information is available on when that might change.

[willi.uebelherr]

Dear Tanstaafi,

many thanks for your clear answer. I did expect this. You don't speak about, what you propose for the future address book concept. And how we can create this.

Do we have a group in Mozilla Tb to discuss the conceptual principles for a "good" addressbook in Tb? And do we have a group, that want to work on that?

Now i live in Venezuela and help to create the technical infrastructures, that we can construct and build, what we need. And in this environment, i am shure, we find many people with the interest to design her tools for communication. And i am shure, in our small world, on our planet, we have many people with the same interest. Mostly not with a good environment, to do that.

Can you describe in short the status of the work on the TB address book? It is stalled, i know. But where i can find the documentation of the discussion process?

many thanks, willi
Coro, Venezuela

[alexzane]

Now, i use circa 16 different address books for different languages and different countries. Inside of an address book, i can create lists. But it is not possible, to create a list on the upper layer and to use different addresses from the different books without to copy the entry.

[tanstaafl]

That is the way it is designed. It does not support nested mailing lists, and all of the contacts used in a mailing list have to be in the same address book as the mailing list.

There was an attempt to completely redesign the address book. It was going to be a single address book that used multiple address book providers, and no longer used Mork (*.mab files). A standalone prototype was created but the project has stalled due to lack of manpower. Its worse now since the current development focus for Thunderbird appears to be on converting code from C++ to javascript in preparation for making Thunderbird run in a browser window a year or two from now. Don't confuse this with webmail, its advance preparation for the day when support for XPCOM/XUL (used by the add-ons) has been dropped, and the gecko rendering engine (used to display HTML etc.) no longer supports Thunderbird, so they need to be ready to switch run time environments to any browser that supports HTML5 and ECMA6 version of javascript. Another reason for doing this is to be able to support smartphones. It will still be a real email client that gets installed on your device, not an equivalent of Gmail. They're just changing the technologies. MailPile, N1, Whiteout Mail etc. are examples of other email clients that do something similar.

See http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... &t=2976617 for more information.