User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:86.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/86.0

Steps to reproduce:

Greetings from Bali, where I’ve recently re-installed Tbird on an upgraded Linux Mint distro (Ulyana 20).

Tbird version is 1:78.7.1+build1-0ubuntu0.20.04.1 .

Actual results:

The problem is that now it is impossible to use or edit addressbook lists. The edit box appears but when you click on OK (to edit) the whole thing disappears.
How do we fix this glitch ?

Help please.

Hi, please provide a full and clear list of steps to reproduce some problem, as a list of steps. Only installing/upgrading something and then doing nothing else will not allow someone else to reproduce some problem with address lists somewhere. Thanks a lot.

Thanks for response. I can't think of any way of explaining more clearly than this:

1 Open Thunderbird
2 Open (ie: click on) Address book.
3 Right click on desired list.
4 Click Edit. List box appears.
5 Click OK. List box disappears.

Will that suffice ?

What's the issue? When I actually edit the list after step 4, like change the name or add/remove members, then those changes will take effect after clicking OK. Of course the panel disappears. The structure of the address book was changed between v68 and v78, so maybe there is a migration issue. Does the malfunction happen for all lists or just a specific one?

Thanks for your response Klaus.

Yes it’s all lists.
Previously when you clicked OK on the edit box the window opened up – didn’t disappear -- and you could select the addresses you wanted from the list. Now you can add an address or delete a single one before clicking OK, but you can’t select multiple addresses.

Practical Example: You’re sending an email, have the contacts sidebar open and want to pick the message recipients from a list.
Previously when you opened the list’s edit box and clicked OK, that list appeared in the sidebar and you could select those people you wanted to send to and those to CC or BCC.
Now you can only select the entire list, which means that it is virtually useless.

Over to you.

Sorry, I can't follow at all. On the contacts sidebar, the context menu of a mailing list offers "Edit List" as the last item. If you edit the list and click OK, the panel closed. "list appeared in the sidebar" makes no sense to me. Maybe you can attach some screenshots. Are or were you using some add on that used to provide a function that expanded the list in the side bar?

Thomas, can you take over here.

1: In "View" open contacts sidebar.
2: Select list to edit (in this case AA Jokers)
3: Click OK.

List should now open in the sidebar, from which you should be able select your desired recipients. But it doesn't open, it disappears.
That's the bad news. The good news is that I have downloaded and activated a tar file of Thunderbird 68.9, and it works properly. So the problem clearly is in Tbird 78, and that's one for you programming wizards to fix because I have no idea how to do it.

Back to you !

I can see what you mean. In TB 68, after dismissing the mailing list edit panel, the list is expanded into the contacts sidebar. Looks like this behaviour has changed in TB 78, no idea whether the previous (TB 68) or current (TB 78) behaviour constitutes a bug.

I have already NI'ed the person most familiar with this area, but there hasn't been a reply yet.

Geoff, has this behaviour changed intentionally in TB 78?

(In reply to Mr Garry from comment #3)

Hey Mr. Garry, thank you for providing a proper list of steps for reproduction.

1 Open Thunderbird
2 Open (ie: click on) Address book.
3 Right click on desired list.
4 Click Edit. List box appears.
5 Click OK. List box disappears.

That's exactly the expected behaviour, so this bug is invalid.
The previous behaviour of exposing the members of a mailing list in contacts sidebar after editing the list was bug 1537564.
The current design of contacts sidebar would not reasonably allow showing members of mailing lists in the sidebar, because we have no way of indicating that you're looking at the mailing list and not the entire address book.
Unfortunately, in the current overcome design, mailing-lists are meant to be just that - a list of addresses to use for bulk mail.

The use case you are describing cannot be achieved with the current mailing list design; you'd want something like tags on each address and then you search for that tag to find members of that tag group (bug 75711).

However, you can mimic such behaviour with a suitable data structure and using AB search, even in contacts sidebar, like this:

In Nickname field (or any other field that is currently searched, check with a unique searchword!), add your tags:

Then in contacts sidebar, do your searches:
:work to find all work mates
:friends to find all friends (even if they are work mates)
:work :tennis to find work mates who also play tennis

The colon (:) is used to make your tags unique and to avoid false positives so that :work will not match "homework".
You can use any other character or prefix to make your tags unique, but I think colon is pretty natural and convenient.

Thanks, Thomas, I was right in assuming that you'd be able to clarify this. Note that there is a call for tags/categories in bug 75711.

(In reply to Klaus B. from comment #10)

Thanks, Thomas, I was right in assuming that you'd be able to clarify this.

Thanks, I'm here to make things clear! ;-)

Note that there is a call for tags/categories in bug 75711.

Yes, that's why I already mentioned that bug in my comment... :

(In reply to Thomas D. (:thomas8) from comment #9)

The use case you are describing cannot be achieved with the current mailing list design; you'd want something like tags on each address and then you search for that tag to find members of that tag group (bug 75711).

(In reply to Mr Garry from comment #12)

So what you’re saying boys is that a perfectly good and very useful tool has been discarded. That’s called regression, not progression, so I’ll be sticking with 68 !

Mr Garry, let's keep it respectful, even if you're unhappy. I've spent time to analyse your use case and I've offered you a workaround which will be much superior in the long run, using the Nickname field for unique address tags, then using the address tags to retrieve your groups - have you tried it?

Your misunderstanding: Showing mailing list contents in contacts sidebar only after list creation/editing was a bug (bug 1537564), so it has never been a feature to begin with. Having to use an unrelated action (Edit list) to get another action (View list in sidebar) does not make any sense in terms of UX, apart from being undiscoverable. Showing mailing list members in the sidebar has very limited use for composition (which would be much better addressed with tag-based grouping in bug 75711), especially when the UI state becomes confusing as there is no UI indication whatsoever that you're now seeing the mailing list and not the complete address book as the UI suggests. It's worse when you create a mailing list from the sidebar - instead of being able to see and use the the new list's entry for composition, you'd have to go through extra hassles of selecting members before adding them, and more unclear steps to return to your AB.

Thanks, bye for now, and please you programmers, in future don’t upgrade things that don’t need upgrading just for the sake of showing that you can do it.

Please refrain from insinuating and talking bad about the very developers who are working very hard to make your free software better.

A good product is a good product. Leave it alone if it doesn’t genuinely need changing.

Yeah, we may wish for that sometimes when we're unhappy with change, but in reality, a software which never changes cannot survive.

Every change breaks someone's workflow: https://xkcd.com/1172/ :-)

EDIT: Further reading: https://www.hyrumslaw.com/
With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.
and
if an interface has enough consumers, they will collectively depend on every aspect of the implementation, intentionally or not

Basically until TB 68 the mailing list edit in the contacts side bar had a clear bug: The list content replaced the original list content in the panel, BTW, with the heading "All address books" above which was clearly wrong.

It's quite possible to think of an option to "expand" the list into the panel and then show the list name above since the list is internally equally treated as a "directory of cards". That could be filed as an enhancement request, but I doubt there would be much interest in it.

Sorry lads, no insult or injury intended. I’ll reply properly in a few days . . . after I get T-bird working properly and catch up on the email backlog.

(In reply to Klaus B. from comment #14)

Every change breaks someone's workflow: https://xkcd.com/1172/ :-)

Nice one, thanks! :->>

It's quite possible to think of an option to "expand" the list into the panel and then show the list name above since the list is internally equally treated as a "directory of cards". That could be filed as an enhancement request, but I doubt there would be much interest in it.

+1

Hello boys, I’m back.
As a reminder, this is about being or not being able to edit and use lists in the Thunderbird addressbook.
Now for the sake of illustration allow me to create an imaginary situation.
Let’s say that we have a business selling pharmaceutical products and regularly send out promotional material to our circle of customers. We have a revolutionary new toothbrush in stock and, naturally enough, want to sell it, so we prepare a circular to send out by email.
We need to think about this, because we know that some of our customers have no teeth, and others are forbidden by their culture or religion from using a toothbrush. Not only would it be rude and inconsiderate to include them in the mailout, but it could be bad for business too. Obviously we need to exclude those customers from this mailout.
So in our newly-prepared email we open our contacts/addressbook as a sidebar, select the desired list, click to edit it, and click OK to open/expand the chosen list into the sidebar.
Now we can select which people we want to send the email to, leaving out the inappropriate ones but not deleting them. They’ll still be there for future mailouts.
Next we click the “Add to Bcc” button to send the message to each selected recipient without revealing everyone else’s name and address. But we know there’s a small group within the list who belong to a toothbrush club and they’ll want to see that their friends have also received the promo, so we select them separately and then click the “Add to To” button.
Our email is now complete and ready to send.
Or it is if we are using Thunderbird 68, but if we are using Thunderbird 78 all of the above is impossible. It has been declared a bug and tweaked out. Instead we are advised to use the Nickname field and address tags, which I’ve tried and found to be time-consuming, inefficient and hopeless.
And now, with the benefit of time, thought and hindsight it is clear to me that it was not a bug; clearly it was designed and engineered that way by someone or some people who were working from experience. They had practical knowledge and instilled it in the app.
So I come back to my original point of March 5, and all I can do is to implore you and whoever programs T-bird to restore its functionality. Meanwhile I’ll continue to use 68, and I shall continue donating to the cause.
Regards, GD

Mr Garry: This ticket is closed. For future reference, you may want to avoid assuming gender or age of people who you don't even know when you're addressing them.