date-of-death field for contacts
Migrated from https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=508745. Still an issue on 3.40.1.
Philipp Schlesinger 2008-01-11 12:13:25 UTC
Please support a date-of-death field for evolution contacts.
Comment 1 André Klapper 2012-06-16 22:17:29 UTC
Could you elaborate why you would want to keep contacts in your addressbook that are not reachable anymore? Only idea that comes to my mind is remembering birthdays of people that have passed...
Comment 2 Philipp Schlesinger 2012-06-20 10:49:29 UTC
That is exactly why I want to keep them: To remembert birthday, day of death and other dates like wedding anniversary of a person.
When a person dies that doesn't mean their data all goes away instantly, website, blog ... One might want to keep contact information to reach relatives.
Comment 3 Stephen 2017-05-22 12:51:04 UTC
Some reasons to keep the contact:
- deleting their contact may feel wrong or inappropriate to the individual. Speaking from my own experience this is definitely the case for me.
- as Philipp said - birthday, anniversary of death etc. are still going to be relevant to the user in many cases, especially if the person is a family member, otherwise close, or close to someone who is close to them. In this case they may want to ensure they receive a reminder when key dates associated with the contact are not missed, for example to be available to support thse bereaved by the person's death.
- the person's photo is displayed in relation to past emails with that person etc. for many clients.
- if the person's email address is obscure, e.g. asdkfjas@example.com, having the contact can continue to facilitate comprehensive search of past messages
- I don't know if it's a feature of any GNOME-centric photo viewers (it really should be!) but having any given contact would facilitate tagging that person in photos.
The last 3 points should also be considered in light of non-GNOME software accessing contacts when the backend is non-local (CardDAV, $cloud_provider etc.)
Reasons for having date of death:
- as a straightforward record.
- would allow the user to specify whether they want to (continue to) be reminded of e.g. the person's birthday, anniversary or not.
- would allow the contact to be excluded from auto-complete and other lookups when composing messages (either automatically or as an option.
Additionally, RFC 6474 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6474) standardises this in an extension to vCard along with places of birth and death.