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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: KMail and contacts - RMB behavior
From:       "Eric Ellsworth" <whalesuit () softhome ! net>
Date:       2002-05-29 16:57:56
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael W. Collette" <metrol@metrol.net>
To: <kde-usability@mail.kde.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2002 12:30 AM
Subject: Re: KMail and contacts - RMB behavior


> On Tuesday 28 May 2002 04:42 pm, Eric Ellsworth wrote:
> > Good point.  This does strike me as something that's well suited for
> > prefetching, as a message just sits there a lot of the time...the
exception
> > I know being: sometimes when I want to add an address to the address
book I
> > rummage through
> >
> > I just like it because it's compact, and *bonus*  you know without
clicking
> > whether the contact is in your addressbook rather than getting "you
can't
> > do this" feedback.

OK, the pre-searching the addressbook is a bad idea.  (That was pretty
gentle beating-up :] )  Is there any other way we can work around the
dead-end dialog?


>Here's what Moz does.
>
> As E-Mail is looked at, Moz Mail collects all the addresses that appear in
the
> headers of those messages in a seperate address book.  Oddly enough, it's
> called "Collected Addresses".  In the preferences you can specify the max
> number of addresses to collect.  The default is 700.

Thanks for explaining to the list - I was implicitly referring to this
feature in Mozilla.  Outlook Express does something similar but much more
annoying - it just takes any address you reply to and stuffs it into your
addressbook.  I'll also look at Pine's get-addresses feature, which a friend
of mine raves about.


> Since I would imagine Eric's real concern is making sure he doesn't lose
> important addresses, this would address that point.

This is part of it. My KMail/OE addressbooks are the only addressbook I own,
so I'm a heavy user.  Since I also store my contacts' phone numbers, and
snail mail addresses in my addressbook, it's really annoying having 6
entries for Jared Yang, one for each email address or From name he's chosen
to use:
    J. Yang jyang@nowhere.net
    Jaredon jyang@fun.net
    Jared Yang jyang@school.edu
    Jared Yang jyang@nowhere.net
    etc
Presently when I want to find someone's phone, I have to look through all 6.
This is why I'm so nuts about making it easy to put multiple email addresses
into one contact.

 I want simple ways to:
1) Add to contacts that exist (initial subject of the thread :)
2) Search my emails by contact for something they wrote
3) Backup/synchronize/import/export my addressbook.  In my case, I use two
desktop machines, both split between Windows and Mdk8/KDE.  In the best of
all worlds, the addressbooks would stay synced between all of them (well,
except I'd hate to deal with all the garbage that OE throws into my
addressbook :-[ )

>A simple text list of
> addresses could be the holder for this information, appending on each mail
> that is read.  On a number of specified events, KMail could initiate a
clean
> up on this list when a user would expect a small delay.  Like program shut
> down, compressing folders, or requesting to view the collected addresses.
> Some nice time to run something like a "sort | uniq" on the list.  Needs
to
> be a teensy more complex, as you also need to track the date an address is
> added.

That's an excellent idea, as a way to keep them small in number.

> When a user spots one of these collected addresses that's a keeper, then
it
> should get a proper entry into the address book.  The mechanics of the
user
> interaction to do so is most likely a topic all its own.

This is what I was thinking of when talking about adding users.  Many if not
most of my friends now have multiple email addresses.

> Personally, I don't share Eric's concerns about whether or not an address
has
> been stored, as I usually keep my book rather small and store my old
messages
> in a tree of folders.  It is probably quite safe to say that other users
> would make good use of a "Collected Addresses" feature that Mozilla is now
> offering.
>
> Is this something that KMail should also be doing?  If so, what kind of
> mechanics would it actually employ?
If you pull up the current addressbook from a message in KMail, and check
the box called "Show Recent Addresses", you get a list of what appears to me
to be auto-collected addresses.  I'd expand this behavior and make the
collection similar to Mozilla.  I like the idea of having a section of the
Address Book called "(Automatically) Collected Contacts"
that catches these.  Your idea to keep them unique is also a good one.  I
would make the Add to Existing Contact  action available to all address in
the addressbook.  This way I could go through the collected address, add the
ones I want to the main address book .

Whew, what a mouthful....

Cheers,

Eric


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