Vista - Contact Folders vs Contact Groups

Sometime ago there was some discussion on Contact Folders vs Groups.
People, myself included, were asking how to get the ability, previously
available with OE, where one could establish individual contact folders and
when working with their emails could work with one selected contact folder.
The advantage being was that you could have a folder for 'family', a folder
for 'business', a folder for 'Boy Scouts', etc. and when you were working in
one of those areas you could work with the contact folder for that group and
that group only.

When you have several hundred contacts but only need to work with one group
at any specific time it would be desirable to be able to select that contact
folder and pick out the individuals from that list that you wanted to work
with and not need to go through all your contacts to find the particular
ones.

Does anyone know of any new developments in this area?

If I remember correctly there were some suggested workarounds but I have
been unable to find them.

I would still strongly advocate that this previous OE feature be
incorporated in WLM.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

"Beejaysoo" <beejaysoo@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ObKm5nZnIHA.5160@xxxxxxI'm going to put my 'Toad of Conduct' hat on again and ask what you did to
try and find them. If I put the subject of your post into the 'Find a
message' box, I get in less than two seconds nine hits, four of them
messages from you (including the one I'm responding to) and three from me
with some suggestions.

I suspect that you're baying at the moon. This application is not OE and
undoubtedly does many things in different ways, and I don't expect the dev
team to spend much time on adding more bells and whistles to a free
application. If and when the app becomes programmable, plug-ins might
appear, but until then, you might just as well adapt your working practices
to the features that are available instead of complaining that you can't do
something in the same way that you're used to.

That said, if you've submitted a feature request [Help menu > Send Feedback
(web)], then that will be taken into account and prioritized by the dev team
in accordance with the number of users making that request.
--
Noel

Hi Noel,

If I cause you grief, please accept my apologies. I guess I'm still
learning search techniques...I was searching in the Vista Discussion
Community and did not find the workarounds I was looking for and I guess I
was hoping some more workarounds may have come about. I don't know why I
didn't try using the 'Find a message box', but should now remember in the
future.

I have now taken your suggestion and created some additional ID's and that
certainly helps separate out some of my contacts...thanks for sharing that
approach.

I'm still "baying at the moon", and would like to see contact folder
concepts incorporated in WLM....from earlier discussions I know there were
several others with similar thoughts. To that end and again on your
suggestion I have entered a request via feedback. I really like WLM, but
sorting through contacts without contact folders is a real pain.

Your comments on future development are a little dis-heartening...do you
really not see much new development on this application?

Thanks again,

bj




"Ildhund" <jnllb@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:uEfNwganIHA.4140@xxxxxx

You don't seem to understand how serious a shortcoming this is.

In OE, if I want to send an email to 2 of the recipients in my "Boy Scouts"
folder, I select that folder and then get to pick the 2 from among 20
contacts therein. In WLM I must pick those 2 out from among the 300+ that are
in my complete contacts list. = Time consuming + eye strain.

Your suggested workaround, in which I would select a WLM contact group, and
then painstakingly remove the other 18 recipients in that group is clearly
unsatisfactory. The other suggestion I saw, in which I must sign-in with an
identity that corresponds to a contact list before I compose an email, has
two problems. First, it's unwieldy, and second, I DON'T WANT TO "SIGN IN" at
all. (You may not have noticed, but there's not much left of the 4th
Ammendment.)

IF ANYBODY HAS A BETTER WORKAROUND, PLEASE POST IT.

More broadly, it seems to me that the ONLY thing "the dev team" has done is
to add a bunch of "bells and whistles" to OE to create WLM. I pray to God I
will never need these new capabilities that apparently come at the cost of an
important time-saving feature that I used constantly.

I really had no issues with my old "dead" mail. There was nothing that I
wished it could do that it did not do, and I don't ever expect (or want) to
have 5+ GB in my Inbox, though I understand that other people value this.

I suppose you get what you pay for. That said, it seems particularly true in
Microsoft's case that "New & Improved" is typically new-yet-worse, especially
where privacy is concerned.

I'm uninclined to "Bay at the Moon." If there is no workaround for this
fatal flaw, I will just uninstall WLM and get another more functional (and
likely simpler) mail program. Or change my address so that I can use a server
that still supports DAV/OE. No baying required.








"Ildhund" wrote:

Have you tried to start entering a name or address?
WLM will display a list and keep narrowing the list the more that you type.
I hardly ever go to contacts.
--
Ronald Sommer

"Goyen" <Goyen@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:612F7A2B-F88A-480B-BF32-BC1590FBF261@xxxxxx