Drag contact to group, reports contact copied, but contact not in group
I have a Personal Address book with gmail groups/lists: Coworkers, Family, Friends, My Contacts, Starred in Android, YouTube. All groups are empty except for My Contacts, which when selected reports "Total contacts in My Contacts: 462". Selecting "Personal Address Book" reports "Total contacts in Personal Address Book: 475".
I have been drag-dropping (one at a time) a number of contacts from "Personal Address Book" to "My Contacts", and for the most part it works fine. But there are a couple of contacts that when I drop them in the list, I see "1 contact copied" in the status bar as usual, but when I search for that contact in "My Contacts", it is not found. Furthermore, the total number of contacts in "My Contacts" remains unchanged. In one case where this happened, I found that the original contact in the address book did not have any email address. So I edited it to add a fake address "namexxxx@nowhere.invalid", and that allowed me to add it to "My Contacts" properly. However, there were a couple of contacts that had correct emails and failed to copy in the same way. I then found out that there was already a contact with the same email address in the list (it had a different name, and I was searching for the name when checking if it was copied) .
I don't have a problem with the behavior except that the status bar reports that the contact was copied when in fact it wasn't. Can this be fixed?
All Replies (3)
Thunderbird 52.4.0 (32-bit) on Windows 10 64-bit
In your case, all the contacts are actually stored in the 'Personal Address Book'. All the sub groups to 'Personal Address book' are 'Mailing Lists' not address books. 'Mailing Lists' are used when you want to send one email to a group of people and want to add all in one go rather than typing each email address. It's like setting a tag/label on a contact in the Personal Address Book, so enabling that contact to be displayed in a list.
As 'Mailing Lists' are designed to be used to send group emails, they must have an email address else they cannot be placed in a Mailing List. This will explain why you had to add the email address to the original contact details in order to get them into the 'Mailing List'.
Sometimes, you may have eg: two people who use the same email address. As Mailing Lists are based on email address, this means you may discover it is not possible to add both into a Mailing list. This explains why you could not find the second name using an already added email address. There is a workaround to force this to work.
Info on Mailing Lists: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-create-and-use-mailing-lists-thunderbird Read section : 'How to add two contacts who use the same email address'
It is not clear from your question as to whether you actually want to use Mailing lists. You can add more 'Address Books' to separate and organise eg: 'Family' from 'My contacts'.
for example, I have separate 'Address Books' called:
- Personal Address Book which I keep for family.
- Business Contacts.
- Friends.
- Collected Addresses for other one off contacts which do not fall into other categories.
I also have a couple of 'Mailing Lists' in eg: Personal Address Book. One is used to send one email to everyone in that Address Book. Another is used to send email to a smaller group of closer family members.
Thanks for the reply, it was slightly helpful, though I marked it as not helpful because it didn't actually contain anything I didn't know or discover during the process, and it didn't respond to the issue of the incorrect status message, which was my real beef.
The mailing list names that I gave were not created explicitly by me, they showed up as a result of some interaction with gmail - I don't know if it was from my initial set of an IMAP account, setting up Zindus address sync, or setting up gContactSync. Probably the latter since I used the option to sync "all contacts and groups (with mailing lists)". And at least at one time those group names seemed to be required by gmail. But when I go to my gmail account on the web to look at contacts, I see only My Contacts.
Well, there were a bunch of issues and complications that I tripped over in various different ways, between contacts on the gmail web app, Thunderbird address books and mailing lists, the gContactSync add-on, and my Android phone set up to sync with my gmail contacts. What I wound up doing was to export my "My Contacts" address list from my Personal Address Book on Thunderbird in the form of vcards (a .vcf file based on the name of the list), removing all lists in it other than "My Contacts" and writing a gawk script to parse the .vcf file and create separate .vcf files named by the primary email address (if any). Similarly, from gmail I exported My Contacts to a vcf file and used the script to parse that into separate files. Then a series of directory compares to compare the vcf files from gmail and TBird and some manual fiddling to come up with a unified list of what I wanted. Then I turned off gContactSync and deleted my personal address book and imported a file concatenating all of the separate vcard files I wanted. Then moved all those contacts into my Personal Address Book, and deleted all my contacts on the gmail web app. Then set gContactSync only to write from Thunderbird to gmail, then sync. Then change gContactSync to sync in both directions and sync again (sometimes strange things happen unless you exit Thunderbird and restart it at various times).
After numerous iterations I reached a state where I have exactly the same contacts in Thunderbird, gmail, and my phone; and changing or adding or deleting contacts in any of those places tends to propagate to the other places. The only mildly surprising thing remaining is that new contacts added to gmail "My Contacts" show up in the Personal Address Book but not in its "My Contacts" list. Maybe not that surprising - guess I should just delete the "My Contacts" list in Tbird, and if desired I can create other mailing lists in my Personal Address Book and groups with the same names in gmail. Remains to be seen if I can set up the gContactSync account settings so that changes to those mailing lists get properly synced between the TBird lists and gmail groups.