Re: [Evolution] Need help with Contacts

[Brewster Gillett <bg fdi us>]

On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 07:16 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> There is no need to mangle subjects like "Re: [Evolution] Need help with
> Contacts/Adam" or address specific people in response;  threading of the
> messages will do that for you/us.

Brewster replies:

I've always been under the impression that not everyone's email
client structure allows them to properly thread, so the name
flag presumably can be of help to some. Maybe that is no longer
the case, though with the proliferation of people using web-based
email, I am not convinced :-)

> On Sun, 2010-08-29 at 19:07 -0700, Brewster Gillett wrote:
> > bg:
> > > > At present I have 70 Contacts filed. All but three are individuals.
> > > > Problems with the three that are "lists" were introduced in an earlier
> > > > email message, and have not yet been resolved. Another topic :-)

adam:
> > > Yes, representing anything other than contacts is problematic.  This
> > > isn't entirely Evolution's fault;  the vCard spec provides no way to
> > > represent anything other than a Contact.

> > You're confusing me here, Adam - the "lists" I refer to are a standard
> > part of the Evo Contacts module, according to the documentation -
> > there should be no reason I cannot file 12 names and email addresses
> > under one Contact and thereby create a Contact List.

adam:

> There isn't a reason you can't;  but it does make the interface odd.

bg:

Can you elaborate on that last part? It isn't clear to me at all.

adam:
> And if you are syncing the addressbook with a server the results are
> undefined.

bg:

I do no synching. My needs are comparatively simple, confined largely to
my home office - I no longer have complex outside IT relationships.

Again, in describing the Contact List needs I perceive that I have;
I am a board member for three separate organizations. There are times
when I may need to *originate* an email message to go to, say, 12
people. Surely you aren't suggesting that I should construct a list from
scratch each time this need arises? What else would fulfill my need to
automate that process, other than the Contacts List function?

I'm always open to alternate solutions. But the one I don't consider
a viable alternative is to manually select and create a list each
time :-)

<snip>

adam:

> > > Can you search for your contacts?

bg:

> > I'm unclear on exactly what you mean by that term in this context.

adam:

> There is a "search" field in the dialog that appears.  If the left pane
> of the dialog does not list all your contacts when the dialog initially
> opens can you search for the absent ones?

bg:

Ahhh - I see that now. I'd simply never had occasion to use it, since
my method is to just scroll through the list provided by the popup
until I get the one I want, and select it.

I tried the search list, with interesting results. Those Contacts
which are not appearing in the popup list will not return for a search,
no matter how I enter their names or addresses. What that tells me is
that the search, in this spot, is confined to only those that are 
already listed in the popup - in other words, it is not able to search
the full list of Contacts on file - only those contained in the popup.

I would be inclined to label that an oversight on the part of the
developers. Why not search the entire Contacts list?

I have invested a good deal of time, involving lots of unavoidable
handwriting of lists, (apparently when running under Ubuntu, Evo
will not honor a print request of the Contacts list unless you are
running as superuser, which means I would have to quit Evo, then
reinvoke it from the command line preceded by that damned "sudo" -
I'm accustomed since the early Eighties at AT&T to being able to
just log in as SU<g>) 
and have turned up some intriguing results. I looked at the full list,
which was at 68 entries, and decided several Contacts could be pared.
So I deleted sufficient Contacts to bring the list total down to 63.
Now, before these deletions, I had eight Contacts which did not appear
in the popup, which sort of confirmed that the popup can only hold 60.
Then I deleted five Contacts - so now my total is 63. However - I am
*still* not seeing the same eight Contacts in the popup, and the popup
count now sits at 55.

As Flip Wilson as Geraldine said in that soda pop commercial some
years ago, "You a total stranger, and the total don't add up!".

Maybe I will eventually have to conclude there are some bugs in all of
this, and submit a report. I have about reached the unavoidable
conclusion that the system's refusal to sort the popup by the "File
under:" can only be a bug - surely nobody could have intended that it
operate in that fashion.

Sorry to ramble on so. One of these times I'll probably ramble even
more, and attempt to explain why it is that for my particular patterns
of use of email, the popup list of Contacts makes the most sense of
any of the composition options offered.



Brewster

-- 
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W. Brewster Gillett             bg fdi us            Portland, OR  USA
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