User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.10 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729) Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100915 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.4 Motivation / Introduction: applications which combine news, mailing, contact lists / address books, and sometimes calendars are in the focus as personal information management solutions since the 1990s. Thunderbird is one of these. However, regarding address books, there is a lot of competition among different solutions, and the latest development shows that mobile devices are gaining more and more importance as contact list managers. All users of such devices and central server or home computer based solutions have to face the problem of synchronisation. The structure of the Thunderbird address book is unfortunately not compatible with most other solutions or devices, which limits synchronisation capabilities to users who use only a compatible subset of address book parameters. Proposal: investigate how other address books or contact lists in the various important solutions are structured (for example: A) mobile devices: Win. Mobile, Android, Apple products, Symbian, Blackberry and others, B) PIM solutions like MS Outlook, Apple, Linux KDE etc.), investigate what people are using, and provide a good new address book structure combining the majority of the used fields. Exemplary changes which seem to be most desirable from my personal point of view: - sort the contact information by private and work - provide at least 2 mobile numbers, 2 fixed line numbers, 1 fax and 2 email addresses respectively for private and work - support category tags for contacts (cp. also tickets 75711, 271976, 204070, 340695 and dependent / blocked tickets) Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: look at Thunderbird address book It would be a reason to celebrate if this could be addressed, since related tickets unfortunately lost the feature request competition for the past 10 years.

Such an effort may depend on Bug 413260 - Refactor the Address Book interfaces And you will probably find many of the same issues mentioned in some of the bugs of this list https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?type1-0-0=substring&short_desc=sync&field0-0-0=short_desc&type0-0-1=substring&field0-0-1=keywords&type1-0-1=allwordssubstr&resolution=---&classification=Client%20Software&classification=Components&query_format=advanced&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&type0-0-0=anywordssubstr&component=Address%20Book&field1-0-0=short_desc&product=MailNews%20Core&product=Thunderbird&field1-0-1=short_desc

Interdependence with interfaces is certainly correct (I can't judge since I am a user, not developer), as long as the interfaces don't work generically with any kind of abook field sets. To clarify the aim of the above feature request: it is about the content of the address book, not about synchronisation technology and interfaces. Kind regards!