Due to a
bug in Thunderbird and Seamonkey, contacts without e-mail addresses cannot be added to mailing lists. If a user or extension attempts to do so the action may fail silently and corrupt the address book. If the address book does not completely break from this it will silently fail (and again possibly break) when more contacts without e-mail address are added which can cause them to be removed from the corresponding Google group.
To avoid this corruption, which requires a 'reset' and resynchronization of the address book, I added a fake e-mail address to all contacts which do not already contain an e-mail address. I tried to hide this address, and you can see it in the list of contacts, but not in the contact details or the new/edit contact dialog.
However, this isn't always necessary, especially if you do not synchronize with mailing lists. There is a hidden preference that only adds the e-mail address when the address book would almost definitely become corrupted without it. See
this post for instructions on how to do this.
So, assuming I test this preference to make sure it doesn't break anything, should I change the value of that preference to only apply the dummy e-mail address when absolutely necessary? Or would you prefer the consistency of dummy e-mail addresses for all contacts without e-mail addresses?
If you have changed the preference please let me know the results.
See
this wiki page for more details.
Poll