Re: XCmail: Share addressbooks between different systems (draft to discuss)

[David Pilgram]

Hello,

Personally speaking, the solution I posted earlier (almost) does exactly
what I want.  For me, the ability to have a common addressbook for (say)
two users on this box is a great help; then the automatic book is updated
for *both* at the same time, and any manual entry into the private book is
is done for both.  I don't have to copy across files every time there is a 
change (and in practice it could be multiusers on this box).  But say user4 
will not want or need access to that common addressbook at all, it needs its 
own.

The main drawback is that it relys on a hard link, which cannot be done
across partitions - which, on this system, happens to be the case in one
signficant case, i.e. between root and /home/usern, as the contents of
/home are on a different partition, and mounted on /home (actually, a 
different disc as well, but that is not the reason why).  This is probably 
not a common problem.

This, of course, does not cover Jürgen's point about two people accessing
it at the same time, which would be true on fully networked systems, and
that is a good point.  But my scheme should certainly useful for one-at-a-
time users (e.g. a family using one computer), when they may each
have their own accounts, but there would be a large number of common
addresses.  And I can hear it:  "yes, we want a common addressbook *and* a
private addressbook". 

Do people really use the automatic addressbook?   It certainly had
teething problems in the parsing of emails in the beta and gamma phases.
In my scheme, both books have to be common for multi-user operation, which
is OK.   

Maybe instead of an auto-addressbook, a pop-up window asking whether this
(new) address should be added to the existing addressbook, logged as a
"variant" of an existing one (to prevent continuous nuisance), or ignored.
Yes, I get emails from people who write from two or more machines, so
there are subtle differences in the From: and Reply To: fields, so they
get logged as separate entries, even though the person and email address
are in fact identical. (unless this is a hang-over from the parsing
problem).

Then one could have single, private addressbook, and optional common
addressbook (being manually selected, so that, in principle, one could
have two or three "common", but mutually exclusive, addressbooks).

Regards,

David Pilgram.