Ability to organize/group/search addresses with custom Tags/Categories/Keywords (vs. current broken mailing list design)
Categories
(MailNews Core :: Address Book, enhancement, P3)
Tracking
(Not tracked)
People
(Reporter: bugzilla, Unassigned)
References
(Blocks 5 open bugs)
Details
(Keywords: pm-triage-needed, ux-efficiency, Whiteboard: [enterprise-relevance][parity-Outlook])
User Story
- This bug is about **rethinking Thunderbird's current mailing lists as TAGS** or CATEGORIES on each address. - This would also be helpful to match and map Outlook's KEYWORDS. - Having a better way of organizing/grouping/searching addresses than the current, flawed mailing list design is especially crucial for Thunderbird in the enterprise. **Using TAGS has many advantages:** - easily set/track/change group membership of a given address via tags - easily create intersecting groups without the technical overhead and intricacies of explicit lists: each address can have multiple tags (group memberships), and groups are retrieved as database queries searching for any addresses having the group's tag ("Friends", "Work", "UX", "Infrastructure", "Support" etc.) - easily do incremental searches: searching for "Thunderbird UX triage" can return Thomas who has the tags: Thunderbird, UX, triage. Iow, cross-group searches to find addresses which are members of several groups. - easily combine several groups with OR searches (to be implemented). **The current mailing list design has many shortcomings.** - ML is AB-bound, i.e. any mailing list can only have members of the current AB. - This leads to the absurd behaviour that adding members from another AB will create a duplicate member entry in the target AB which has the ML, and deleting that duplicate entry will delete the entry from any mailing list in the same AB it is member of. - Iow, cross-AB mailing lists are de facto *not* possible. - I'm not sure how the mailing list technically keeps track of its members, but I'd bet that connection is also flawed and error-prone.
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Comment 38•4 years ago
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Is bug 204070 a duplicate of this? Thank you
Comment 40•4 years ago
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Note that "categories" in Outlook are stored in a multi-value string named property "Keywords". If something like tags or categories were implemented in Thunderbird, the Outlook categories could be mapped to them.
Comment 41•4 years ago
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Hi Ben, Geoff, Rob, Magnus and Ryan,
Can the Thunderbird core team please implement something like "Tags" or "Categories" in the Address Book before Thunderbird 91 ESR?
Tags are already available in the Mail and Calendar modules. Adding "Categories" (aka "Tags") to the core Address Book would provide more consistency across the Thunderbird program.
IT Support has done a lot of work with Thunderbird's support of Outlook 2010 and later. Outlook 2010 is no longer supported and people can then move more easily from Outlook to Thunderbird with Thunderbird 91 ESR.
The CardBook add-on also has Categories that add-on could help with the core Address Book in Thunderbird.
"IT Support @ Henk" as provided significant contribution of three months:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/log?rev=henk
It would be good to see that the core developers implement something like tags or categories before Thunderbird 91 ESR, so the Outlook categories could be mapped to them.
What do you think?
Thank you
Comment 42•4 years ago
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This won't be happening before 91. And please don't hit everybody you know with NI requests.
Comment 43•4 years ago
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Is something like tags or categories on the Thunderbird development roadmap for the near future? Thank you
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Comment 44•4 years ago
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Would like address tagging yes, maybe for the next release after 91.
Comment 45•4 years ago
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Hi Alessandro,
A suggestion for you... if tags are implemented for contacts grouping... why not also implement tags for email address grouping?
It may be usefull to allow tags on email addresses within contact, especially those with multiple addresses, to be used in addition or replacement of mailing list / distribution list...
So in compose windows you could use tags to quickly identify/generate a set of email addresses...
e.g #all_staff #team1 #projectX #eventLambda
In compose window, ones a tag is validated into pill, a + sign prefix could allow to expand it to check list of email addresses associated to it...
That would be helpful and easier to maintain than mailing list as per say... though they could appear as mailing list into the compose window...
This would also help keeping mailing lists up-to-date when email address of contact may change... as with tags the mailing list would be generated automatically dynamically based on contact info... and not hardcoded in a list as currently...
Comment 46•4 years ago
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So in compose windows you could use tags to quickly identify/generate a set of email addresses...
Wouldn't be this identical to an Address Book list?
I think the mechanism is exactly the same.
We should definitely have a better UI for the pills to identify and allow "expanding" or "peaking into" an AB List.
I think this bug references a completely different thing.
Comment 47•4 years ago
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(In reply to Alessandro Castellani [:aleca] from comment #46)
So in compose windows you could use tags to quickly identify/generate a set of email addresses...
Wouldn't be this identical to an Address Book list?
I think the mechanism is exactly the same.
Well yes and no...
Currently your create an AB list and add email addresseses manually to it... so it is a static list of email addresses... but there is no link between AB contact email addresses and AB list email addresses... if you change the contact email address it does not change it in the list. You have to manually remember in which list you put the address to remember updating it... also from contact view you cannot see list membership for their email address...
What may be usefull is ability to handle AB list
more dynamically by either:
- add a contact to the list and choose which email address from contact to use (if multi set) - from within the AB List edit view
or - add an email address to a list - from the AB contact edit view - via a tag (or list name) associated to the email address - this way you can also know quickly which list a contact email address belong to...
Then you can use # character in compose window recipient field to lookup for a list (or group of contacts?) as opposed to a just a contact...
In both case it would result in an list of contact email addresses, but the dynamic list would also allow to have email address updated (or removed) automatically from the list when contact is updated (or deleted) from AB (probably via a prompt for confirmation). The same may go for Display Name if it can be handled within a list... along side email address...
I thought this bug was for implementing tags in AB that is why I mentioned it here but can always be raised in a separated bug if relevant. Tags on contacts and tags on contacts (for contact groups) email addresses (for list association) may be two different things perhaps.
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Description
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