Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Last month, we got started with setting up email in Thunderbird to help us with Personal Information Management. This month, we’ll look at basic contact management. This is all to service the common New Year’s resolution to become more organized in the upcoming year.
Basic Contact Management: Thunderbird Address Book One of my personal ongoing regrets is my continued deficiencies in keeping up with various phone calls and other communications, particularly in regards to commitments made by others, and then not kept. Many times, I have called institutions that I have some kind of business relationship with, and referenced a prior conversation, only to be queried as to whom I had previously spoken with, and to have no recollection. You’d think I would learn…. There is no little irony in the fact that I worked for years in call centers, and was a real stickler for documenting calls thoroughly and accurately. In my personal life, not so much – frequently to my dismay and/or detriment. Fortunately, my needs in this respect are fairly basic, and are well met by use of the Thunderbird integrated address book, as would probably be the case for many users.
The Thunderbird integrated address book requires no additional installation or configuration. You can get to it by opening Thunderbird and going to Address Book at the top of the main Thunderbird program window (left). This will open the Address Book (shockingly enough). Shown above. Click New Contact at the top of the Address Book. Let’s use the default Add to: as Personal Address Book. As you can see, you can put in a solid amount of default information here that will suit the needs of most users pretty well. What is actually not obvious in the interface is that we are seeing the default information for the Contact page of data. It’s not highlighted or anything in the list at the top, but that is what it is defaulting to. Click Private and you’ll see this page displayed: The next page is for Work information (below).
We’re going to skip Other for just a moment and look at the Chat data page: I would hate to have that many instant messaging accounts! Here’s the page for the Photo information: You can pick a photo from your local hard drive or from the Internet. And here’s the page we’re going to really use, Other: You can obviously use Custom 1, 2, 3, and 4 as open fields for any criteria (I suggest using Custom 1 to differentiate between maybe Friends, Family, Business, etc. as a useful potential example), and Notes is a freeform field that I intend to use pretty extensively going forward.
As you can see, by the time you’ve used all these pages for a contact, you’ve got a pretty thorough set of information for that contact. For the purposes of personal call tracking, I propose to do what I used to do with my Outlook contacts, and that is to track calls to a certain contact using the Notes field on the Other page. This will not produce much of a useful searchable relational database, it’s true, but it should be more than sufficient to track the repeated calls I have to make to my arch-nemesis, Humana health insurance (their sole reason for existence seems to be making my life as miserable as they can). They are actually the WORST company I deal with in terms of needing to record calls made to them and noting names of contacts, dates of requests, and that sort of thing (followed closely by my other archenemy, eBay), and the Thunderbird Address Book Notes field on the Other page should still be quite sufficient for my purposes.
Here’s an example of a Notes entry for Humana ‘health’ insurance. I intend to differentiate between Humana insurance, Humana pharmacy, and Humana Over The Counter (OTC), all of which have presented me with numerous problems and challenges. I’ll use different Contact entries for each, since they all do have different phone numbers. Let’s look at a few sample entries that I need to track for Humana OTC.
Every quarter, I have an allowance for OTC medical supplies from Humana’s OTC department. On November 5, 2019, I called to order Vitamin D2 because my nephrologist wanted me to start taking it. On December 7, it occurred to me that it had still not arrived, so I called back. I was told that their records show I requested it, but no one there actually placed the order. I re-requested it. On January 7, I called again and was told that the order STILL wasn’t placed on December 7. I requested it again, with the specific proviso that it should be accounted for under Quarter 4 for 2019, when the request was originally placed, as I intended to use my 2020 Q1 allowance for something else, and it was obviously not my fault that it was not fulfilled in 2019 Q4 as it should have been. So, here is the Notes text to record those calls/requests, taken from the index cards where I had been manually writing down the information: • 11/05/2019: Called and requested Vitamin D2, maximum OTC dosage, per recommendation of Humana pharmacist. Qty per bottle 100, $9 per bottle. Ordered 3 bottles. • 12/07: Follow-up call, representative confirmed that Vitamin D2 was requested on 11/05, was told that Vitamin D2 was not ordered. Re-requested order, asked for it to be expedited. Representative said there would be a $12 charge to expedite, rejoined that it is not MY fault they did not place the order a month ago when requested. Rep agreed to expedite at no charge. • 01/07/2020: Called and was told that order was still not placed. Requested re-order and expediting, and specified multiple times that charge should be on 2019 Q4. Had to specify at least six times on call that it should be Vitamin D2, NOT D3. • 01/15: Received Vitamin D3, did not notice it was wrong until after taking several over the course of 4-5 days. • 0120: (Representative Mike) Called to re-order Vitamin D2 as a replacement for incorrect order fulfillment, was told that Humana OTC does not carry Vitamin D2 at all, in any dosage. Requested 2 pairs of compression stockings, to be charged to Q4 2019 OTC allowance, as Vitamin D3 was NOT requested and should not count against that quarter’s allowance. Was told that a one-time per year exception was allowed and would be used to correct Humana’s error (although, again, not my fault). So, on the next page (top left), is the completed fields on the Other page. All the information didn’t fit in the displayable area in Notes, but notice the scroll bar to the right of the field – you can scroll to see the rest. Now, on the next page (top right) is the completed Work data page: As you can see, we only needed the Organization and Department fields here. The Contact page stores the phone number, which is all we really need on that page. And finally, once we hit OK, the contact will be saved to our Personal Address Book, where we can see it in its completed form: To make changes or additions, you can highlight the card in the upper right pane and click Edit up at the top of the window, or just double-click in the top right pane (double-clicking is easier, but you can do it however you like). Next month, we’ll cover how to install Lightning to help manage your personal calendar in Thunderbird., since we didn’t quite get that far this month as previously promised. Next month: Setting up Lightning to extend Thunderbird’s PIM capabilities.**