[MlMt] r5907 and Group Address completion

[Glenn Parker]

On 22 Jul 2022, at 12:12, Glenn P. Parker wrote:

> I have also noticed some odd behavior with address group completion. 
> For me, a particular group of 10 addresses gets doubled (the entire 
> group is repeated) every time. However, a larger group of about 15 or 
> so consistently expands correctly.

The latest test release (56911) fixes my issues with address group 
expansion. I spent most a day noodling around with the Mac Contacts app 
and Google Contacts to narrow down the problem, after which Bennie was 
able to reproduce it and apply a fix.

If anyone is interested, here are the gory details.

The specific issue was with “unified” contacts, where the Mac 
Contacts app combines address book entries from two (or more) sources 
into a single virtual contact. For entries like this, you will see a 
“cards” section in the Mac Contacts app that lists the sources for 
the entry, e.g. “Google”, “iCloud”, or “On My Mac”. This 
allows you to view and edit (?) the information from each source, or to 
break a link to a source, if need be.

OK, why would you want to have multiple sources for an address? 
Wouldn’t it make more sense to maintain a single source to avoid 
confusion and/or duplication? Great questions! That’s what I thought I 
was doing by keeping all my addresses in Google Contacts, then enabling 
my Google account in the Contacts app. And it worked fine *until* I 
created an address group in the Contacts app (and I think Bennie updated 
the Contacts handling code).

The Mac Contacts app does not sync the address groups (tags) from 
Google, so I have to manually create these groups in Mac Contacts. Not a 
huge deal, since my groups have less than 20 addresses and they don’t 
change very often, but I do have to manually manage these groups across 
2 or 3 devices. But, when I drag a Google contact into a Mac Contacts 
group, I end up with a local “shadow” copy of the Google contact. 
The source for this new copy is “On My Mac”. I didn’t ask for this 
copy, it’s something the Contacts app does automatically. The copy has 
all the same data as the Google contact, and presumably the Contacts app 
needs it to implement the address group, but this means any Google 
source address that is used in a group now gets two sources: 
“Google” and “On My Mac”.

The bug was that MailMate ignored entries with more than one source 
during address group auto-completion while composing a message. To make 
matters more confusing, due to some sloppiness on my part, my existing 
groups contained a mix of single and two-source addresses. Only the 
two-source addresses were being dropped, and it took a while to notice 
that specific feature of these addresses (having two sources). I flushed 
and re-synced my Mac Contacts database, then I re-created my groups. 
That meant that every address in the group now had two sources, and this 
totally broke the address group in MailMate. At that point, Bennie could 
reproduce the problem and develop the patch.

Everything seems to work correctly now. Thanks, Bennie!

Glenn P. Parker
glenn.parker at comcast.net
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