Googletalk contacts not available in Mail application
 

Hi,

I signed in onto googletalk and msn, and I realized that when you try to use the default mail application, it will not use the google talk or msn email id already stored in a contacts id.

Only way so far is if i enter their email address again, this time using the Email tag detail.

Is this a bug or just a major flaw by the designers.

Also, I wan't sure whether to put this under N900 or maemo, so mods, move it to the right place

P.S. its been 24 hours since I got my cellphone, and loving it

Re: Googletalk contacts not available in Mail application
 

REport that!

Re: Googletalk contacts not available in Mail application
 

I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve here. The way I read your post, it's not a bug at all. You cannot send mails to XMPP-contacts (including google talk) only because XMPP-IDs contain the @ character.

my google talk contacts, automatically imported from google as soon as i set up my account, include a lot of jabber-IDs that are totally different from the person's mail address. sending a mail to these IDs just wouldn't work, so the N900 mail client must not offer them as a mail address.

Re: Googletalk contacts not available in Mail application
 

I get the jabber account, but atleast for Googletalk and MSN, we should be able to email them. It seems quite a nuisance to add their email ids all over again from scratch dont you think?

Re: Googletalk contacts not available in Mail application
 

I don't think it's a bug, it's not a feature that's implemented simply because in contacts the IM fields are separate from the email address fields. A nice-to-have would be for it to use the IM field address if the IM field was a valid email address and the email field was blank, but again, I think this is more of a missing convenience-feature than a bug.

Re: Googletalk contacts not available in Mail application
 

well, it definitely is an inconvenience.

hopefully they will fix it soon :)

Re: Googletalk contacts not available in Mail application
 

Whilst MSN generally is for a valid email address this is not a requirement. I actually use an account that no longer has a valid email account associated with it and a collegue has one that never has been. The MSN client checks the validity of it's own domain to decide if offering mail as an option. The IM client here is generic not specific in nature.

It would make more sense to possibly offer the ability to copy the email address from an IM address but not a hard link.

Re: Googletalk contacts not available in Mail application
 

Again, I think it is a misconception. What the N900 presents to you as "the Google Talk account" of a person is the (generic XMPP-)ID that you saved for this person under your Google Talk account. In other words: Just because the field is called "Google Talk Chat" does not mean the content of this field is a valid gmail email address. It can be any XMPP-ID on any server.

My personal Google Talk account shows a lot of contacts. Only 2 of them have Google accounts at all. They don't use this Google account for mail, though, neither do I. All the others are on whatever XMPP-servers around the globe.

So sending an email to any of the "things with an @-sign" that show up as Google Talk accounts in my address book would fail miserably... Either because there's no mail server at the other end, or because the person chose not to use the mail account.

Bottom line: It can't be done. You cannot expect a chat ID to be a valid mail address. Even more dangerous: Even if you can expect it to be a valid mail address technically (as with MSN, or say GTalk accounts within Google's own domain), nobody says your contact will ever read mails you send there.

I do agree, though, that it would be a nice feature to make copying easier. This should/could be done as a third party app, though, because it's probably something not everyone wants - and something that needs a powerful interface of its own. (Like: Copy every Google Talk contact to an email field? Copy only those with a Google domain? Show those that would be copied so you can de-select a few? ...?)

The contacts backend is still EDS, isn't it? It should be possible for application developers to retrieve and manipulate data from there.

Re: Googletalk contacts not available in Mail application
 

@OP - Maybe you could sugest a brainstorm for functionality like this? I suspect something similar to the Hermes app that scrapes information from Social Networking sites might be a good starting point.