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List:       kmail-devel
Subject:    Re: Request for comments: New address book API
From:       Don Sanders <sanders () kde ! org>
Date:       2001-10-16 23:55:18
[Download RAW message or body]

On Wednesday 17 October 2001 07:59, Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> [I didn't cc this message to kde-core-devel since I don't
> have write access and didn't want to bother the
> moderator.]
>
> On Tuesday 16 October 2001 13:28, Don Sanders wrote:
> > On Tuesday 16 October 2001 18:31, Cornelius Schumacher
> >
> > wrote:
> > > The categories can be used for grouping addresses. I
> > > will add the function "Addressee::List
> > > AddressBook::findByCategory( const QString & )". Then
> > > you can easily get all entries belonging to a certain
> > > category. Each entry can have multiple categories.
> > > Does this fulfil the requirements of distribution
> > > lists or is there something else, which has to be
> > > added?
> >
> > I believe this fulfills the requirements. (Aliases are
> > distribution lists of length one so they are done too).
>
> I don't think so. Distribution lists are lists of email
> addresses and not lists of address book entries. 

A distribution lists is a list of address book entries. If 
the email address of someone in the list is updated then 
the distribution list should be automatically updated. That 
won't happen if a list of email addresses is used.

> If an
> address book entry has several email addresses (and I
> guess a lot of entries do) how should we know which of
> those email addresses the message should be sent to. I'm
> afraid we can't use categories for our purposes. For our
> purposes we need aliases which can be associated with
> single email addresses. The GUI for this could and should
> be provided by KMail (or maybe libkdenetwork so that it's
> reusable in other apps).

For practial purposes if someone has multiple active email 
address then it's necessary to create one address book 
entry for each active email address.

Allowing multiple email addresses for each person is more of 
a gimmick than a truely useful feature.

> I didn't have a look at the API so maybe the following is
> already possible.
> It would be very nice if every app could add custom
> entries (I guess this is possible) and custom subgroups
> to address book entries. If the latter is possible we
> could simply generate a subgroup for every email address
> which has an alias or which appears in a distribution
> list. In fact now that I think about it, it would already
> be enough to be able to create custom entries because we
> could simply put all aliases into a list with the email
> address as key. But then we would probably have to search
> for the email addresses which belong to a distribution
> list on our own without being able to use some convient
> API functions.

Custom entries aren't possible in the old or new 
addressbook. I plan to fake them by in KAddressbook by 
showing an entry for each category.

I don't follow this proposal completely it seems overly 
complicated to me.

> One powerful feature of aliases can't be achieved this
> way. With the above implementations it's not possible to
> build a hierarchy of aliases. OTOH I don't think that
> this is very important although it would make managing
> large distribution lists which basically consist of
> smaller distribution lists much easier.

I don't see support for hierarchial aliases as being 
important.

Don.

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