Subject: feature request: multiple nicknames in one addressbook entry

From: Joel Boonstra <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 15:24:42 -0400 (EDT)

[ preface: I have checked the FAQ and list archives for this, and found
nothing. Please point me to the appropriate URLs if this question has
already been answered ]

I've got a pretty extensive address book, and it comes up a lot of times
that I'll try to use more than one nickname to identify a person.  That
is, if I know someone named 'john', but I also call them 'jack' sometimes,
it's equally likely that I'll enter either 'john' or 'jack' in my To: line
when composing a new message.  Ideally, my address book would recognize
either as being the intended recipient, and fill in the approprite
address.

The only way that I currently know of to accomplish this would be to
create a separate addressbook entry for each nickname that I'd want to
use.  The obvious problem is that data can now become out-of-synch.  If
John's address changes, and I change the 'jack' entry, but forget about
the 'john' entry, I'll have two different email addresses stored for him.

The ideal solution in my mind would be to allow a comma-separated list of
nicknames to be specified when creating a new addressbook entry.  I see by
trial-and-error that commas aren't allowed in the nickname field.  Does
this mean that they will be used for something soon?  Or is there another
reason for the restriction?

In any case, would this feature be feasible?  To simplify, perhaps there
could be a nickname (used as a primary key, of sorts) and then a list of
alternate nicknames.  All sorting and such would be done on the primary
nickname.  Poking around in the code, it seems that this would be a pretty
major change.

Have others run into this as well?

-- 
[ joel boonstra | [email-masked] ]

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
 For information about this mailing list, and its archives, see: 
 http://www.washington.edu/pine/pine-info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: Steve Hubert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 11:00:21 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)

One way to do this is to have a primary entry for john, with all of the
data. Then add another address book entry with nickname jack. The only
data for jack is that the address is john. You don't fill in the Fullname
or anything else in the jack entry. Now if you use jack, it will be the
same as if you used john.

-- 
Steve Hubert <[email-masked]>
Networks and Distributed Computing, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

On Wed, 26 Sep 2001, Joel Boonstra wrote:

> [...]
> [...]