On 07/05/2011 02:49 PM, Vojtěch Zeisek wrote:

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Dne 5.7.2011 13:19, Stan Goodman napsal(a):

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The source addressbook is in a large Vcard v3.0 file. I have installed the MoreVunctions addon in Thunderbird. Using the Import function, I inform it that this is a .vcf file and let 'er rip.

The error message that appears immediately says: "An error occurred importing addressees from vCard file (.vcf)", with no diagnostic information. The resulting imported address book consistes of only part of the first card in the source file: only the line "Email:<correct address>"; the source card includes the name of the contact, but that is absent in the target. I haven't tried myself, but there is embedded import function within TB 5 (no need of any add-on): Tools | Import... | Contacts Might be it could be better...? Good luck, Vojtěch That is the method I used. I haven't even found how to use the Addon to import. I thought that Tools > Import > Addresses was not native, but was the result of installing the Addon. When I delete the first entry in the source and try to import the resulting file, the same error message appears, but nothing at all makes it to the target. I do not see anything obvious wrong with these entries. Here are the first two card, with actual data disguised:

BEGIN:VCARD EMAIL:xxx@aol.com N:LastName;First;;; UID:02qwGGxEQS VERSION:3.0 END:VCARD

BEGIN:VCARD FN:FirstName N:Name;;;; NAME:Name NICKNAME:Nickkname TEL;TYPE=CELL:(050)xxx-yyyy UID:04LJIjLDNv VERSION:3.0 END:VCARD

How can I find what is bothering the utility and correct it?

- -- Vojtěch Zeisek

Komunita openSUSE GNU/Linuxu Community of the openSUSE GNU/Linux

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-- Stan Goodman Qiryat Tiv'on Israel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On 07/05/2011 02:52 PM, Anton Aylward wrote:

Stan Goodman said the following on 07/05/2011 07:19 AM:

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How can I find what is bothering the utility and correct it? I had to deal with this last year.

It only imports ONE record.

Are you sure? Where is that written? It turns the function into a toy. For a bunch of people as large and as vocal as Mozilla, it's a pitiable disappointment. My file has over 600 entries; I am not about to enter them one at a time. If there were a script to install successive record, or enugh information to enable writing one..... Before I made this attempt with Vcard, I tried with an .ldif file. That worked, but the address book function doesn't know how to handle some of the field that came from the Kaddressbook source. Thus for a contact's website is labeled work phone. Maybe I have to put up with that. I'm not especially enamored of Thundermug; it's just that I am a refugee from Akonadi. -- Stan Goodman Qiryat Tiv'on Israel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On 07/05/2011 06:21 PM, Anton Aylward wrote:

Stan Goodman said the following on 07/05/2011 10:55 AM:

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On 07/05/2011 02:52 PM, Anton Aylward wrote:

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Stan Goodman said the following on 07/05/2011 07:19 AM:

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How can I find what is bothering the utility and correct it? I had to deal with this last year.

It only imports ONE record.

Are you sure? Where is that written? Its not. I found out by experimentation.

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It turns the function into a toy. Correct.

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For a bunch of people as large and as vocal as Mozilla, it's a pitiable disappointment. no, its the result of a single developer of the plugin.

You don't mean the MoreFunctions addon, do you? Apparently I didn't use it -- because I don't see how to do so. Perhaps the Addon knows how to import a whole Vcard file. Does anybody know how? But this is not the only screwy thing in TB. There is a formatting field just above the composing window that I would like to contain "Body text" permanently, but that keeps jumping to "Paragraph" and is driving me up the wall.

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My file has over 600 entries; I am not about to enter them one at a time. If there were a script to install successive record, or enugh information to enable writing one..... If I recall correctly, I had about 400. I used some other mailer (on windows I think, perhaps Outlook) to import them and then (a windows version of Thunderbird or something) import then and then export them in Mozilla-native format (and hand carry via PCCard to the Linux machine) and import then into Thunderbird.

That was with an earlier version of Thunderbird. YMMV now.

Ah, that seems familiar. I think that was the format I hand carried across. Then why go through all of that, since TB knows how to import it directly? but the address book function doesn't know how to handle some of the field that came from the Kaddressbook source. Why doesn't this surprise me?

It is why I turned to LDAP. I'll look into that.

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Thus for a contact's website is labeled work phone. Maybe I have to put up with that. I thought there was a thing that let you control the mapping? No? Oh well....

I guess someone will say "this is Open Source, you can write your own". Well I _could_ build my own house and car and aeroplane. People do. There was a book in the 1950s or 1960s called "How to build your dream house for $5000". I used it for making extensive renovations on a house

Your procedure is not clear. You started with what kind of file? Which you imported into (maybe) Outlook, then it gets blurry. Can you detail it? Before I made this attempt with Vcard, I tried with an .ldif file. that was already build, but needed it. That was then, this is now.

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I'm not especially enamored of Thundermug; it's just that I am a refugee from Akonadi. I don't find that difficult to accept. BTDT. I've tried deleting Akonadi but it keeps coming back. Freddy Kruger has nothing on Akonadi! I don't think Akonadi was installed until I installed it explicitly. Next time I install a new OS release, I won't do that.

-- Stan Goodman Qiryat Tiv'on Israel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On 07/05/2011 11:49 PM, Anton Aylward wrote:

Stan Goodman said the following on 07/05/2011 04:37 PM:

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Your procedure is not clear. You started with what kind of file? Which you imported into (maybe) Outlook, then it gets blurry. Can you detail it? No, this was very NOT recent

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Before I made this attempt with Vcard, I tried with an .ldif file.

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Ah, that seems familiar. I think that was the format I hand carried across. Then why go through all of that, since TB knows how to import it directly? Right. But that wasn't what I started with. That was when I ended up with and as you said, imported directly. Once I had converted to that format.

I recall the conversion involved using Outlook on a borrowed Windows machine but don't recall the details.

I only did it once and I think it was the kind of stress induced trauma that causes amnesia. (Using windows often does that to me.)

I've been using the address book that had been exported as ldif from kmail. It needs a lot of work: Many (several hundred) of the records lack a Display Name. Referring back to kmail, I see that they don't have one there either -- for whatever reason, they have only a first and last name -- but kmail is smart enough to rely on those, and the record is displayed as though there is a Display Name. Thunderbird, on the other hand, seeing only first and last names, displays the user name of the record's email address. I'm sure this is very clever (no, I'm not), but it is also unhelpful in cases where the username is something like happygardener2463, so these have to be fixed. The displayed list shows only Work telephone numbers; to see Home numbers, the record has to be opened. The default formating option is "Unknown", and has to be set individually to "HTML" or "Plain Text" for each record. I never send HTML messages, but I have not found a way to set "Plain Text" globally. I will have to do this for all 600+ records individually, to make TB stop asking me what I want to do. The developers of the TB address book did not invest a lot of thought in its design. -- Stan Goodman Qiryat Tiv'on Israel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

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Many (several hundred) of the records lack a Display Name. Referring back to kmail, I see that they don't have one there either -- for whatever reason, they have only a first and last name -- but kmail is smart enough to rely on those, and the record is displayed as though there is a Display Name. Thunderbird, on the other hand, seeing only first and last names, displays the user name of the record's email address.

I'm seeing a different behaviour with Thunderbird. If I fill in first and last name then that is used to build the display name, If an only if I make (directly or indirectly) an address book entry for an addressee that has no supplied firs/last names, just the raw "@" address, then yes, Thunderbird uses that as a display name sine it has nothing else. If I reply to something like From: Ken Schneider - openSUSE or From: "Ken Schneider - openSUSE" suse-list3@bout-tyme.net then that goes in the address book. Thunderbird is smart enough to know about the bits between "" and <> and the RFC rules. The mistake it makes is to do a First name: Ken Last name: Schneider - openSUSE Any yes it will catenate those for the display name :-) I've verified that just now :-) I've seen this behaviour in Thunderbird, presumable following the RFCs, for as long as I can recall. How it may work when you import I don't know, that that's how it works when you're using it.

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The displayed list shows only Work telephone numbers; to see Home numbers, the record has to be opened.

It also fails to display the date of birth home address, the name of the spouse, the ages and names of the children and much else. Yes, Mozilla is deficient in not supplying a means of selecting what you want displayed in the way, for example, Dolphin does. But wait! What is this? An extension! "Select Address Book Text" <quote> Without this extension, Thunderbird requires you to open the "Properties" dialog box and spend time searching again for what you want, and copying each field individually. With Select Address Book Text, when you see what you want, you can copy it immediately. </quote> And if that's not quite what you want I'm sure you can hack to to do what you _do_ want. After all, this is Open Source. Looking though, I see many other extension to "import" addresses from various sources, including scanning message file headers. Or perhaps "Sender Name " https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/sender-name/ <quote> This extension shows the sender's and recipient's display name and any address book attributes in the thread pane. </quote> Or perhaps "EMail Address Crawler" https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/email-address-crawler/ <quote> Automatically fill your address books ... with e-mail addresses extracted from all your e-mails. </quote> Now before you complain that these aren't for TB5, two things. Many only don't run because the installer has a limit check. Change that and they run fine. About half the extensions I run I've tweaked like that. Instructions? Go google. "The answers are out there" Not quite what you want? Again, even though I'm not a programmer, I can usually make sense of the code and figure out how to add minor bits like 'more fields". BTDT. -- Maybe somebody should try to teach journalists to say "scriptkiddies". It would reduce the ego-boost would-be "elite hackers" get from descriptions of their squalid little pranks. - Alan Rocker -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Stan Goodman said the following on 07/09/2011 10:15 AM:

You may well be right that the two parts of a name will be concatenated in sent messages.

Since I checked before posting I am confident that I am :-)

I hadn't tried sending mail to any of those records that lacked a display name, and now they have all been fixed. My complaint was about the displayed list of addresses in the Address Book window, where the absence of a display name often made it impossible to know to whom the record belonged. If you are correct about the ability to concatenate, one wonders why the Address Book doesn't exploit that ability, but instead falls back on the email username, which is often cryptic.

Thunderbird has to deal with what it is dealt. If we are talking abut incoming mail that you reply to that ends up in "collected addresses" (until you move then) then its parsing the "From: " line. If all that's there is the "@" then that's all it has to deal with. If its the examples I gave that meet the RFC then it can work with that. Yes, people do send mail with just their address; some (make that many!) lists do too. On Yahoo(groups) and Google(groups) people have account names - handles, labels, tags, aliases - that are separate from their email addresses. This is still not their name. Some people are like that. Some professional lists I'm on won't allow subscribers to stay unless they clearly identify themselves by real name. It doesn't have to be in the email address, but still And lets face it, going though your mbox files (or even MaiDir directories) with grep, building a list, sorting and uniq-ing it, cleaning it up, then running it through awk or perl to build a series of LDIF or VCF entries isn't a big deal. -- The improvement of our way of life is more important than the spreading of it. If we make it satisfactory enough, it will spread automatically. If we do not, no strength of arms can permanently oppose it. - Charles A. Lindbergh -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org