Hello Jack, On 02/16/2015 03:06:25 PM Mon, Jack wrote:
Hello again, I use balsa in a mostly KDE environment, but keep my main contact list in a vcard file, which Balsa handles just fine. However, I'm now trying to add a distribution list. I can create one in vcard by simply adding each address as an EMAIL: but the "TO" line has only the email addresses, not the human readable name as can be included in a single contact entry. 1) does anyone know if there is a way to do this in a vcard file? (I've searched, and not found anything that looks like it would work.) 2) is there any chance (short of my coding it from scratch) of getting Balsa to use the KDE internal contact mechanism? (akonadi? still KDE4 although if it's easier in Frameworks 5, I'll wait.) 3) any other suggestions?
For many years, Balsa has contained code for making distribution lists in vCard and LDIF address books, based on the "ORG:" field. When an address book is loaded, an RFC822 "group" address is created for every organization that is found. Each group address lists all the people in that organization. So if you create a fake organization like "Jack's distribution list" and add it to the organization field for each person that you want included, then it will show up in the list of completions if you start typing "Jack", and if you select it, you'll get an address like "Jack's distribution list: First User <first_user host>, Second User <second_user host>;" and so on. That's arguably an abuse of the ORG field, and could be quite confusing for someone who uses their address book to hold real organizational information, because a group address would be generated for every real organization. We'd probably want to have another check button on the address book window like "[ ] make a distribution list for each organization" to disable unwanted bloat in the completion list. Alternatively, we could use a private extension like X-BALSA-DISTRIBUTION-LIST and make it editable in the address book editor, with semicolon-separated values so that a person could be included in more than one list. That would avoid polluting the ORG field, and make it clear that the contents are meaningless except to Balsa. For these various reasons, the code for doing this has always been disabled, with no configure option to enable it. Amazingly, it still compiles (with one minor fix) and even works, so if you wanted to build your own version of Balsa with this feature enabled, it's straightforward. But we should really have some discussion about a good way to give Balsa better support of distribution lists. Looking forward to comments! Peter
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