here and there, the idea of supporting multiple e-mail addresses per contact come up.
i also thought about this some time ago, my thoughts were:
- showing multiple email-addresses of a single contact in different chats may be wanted eg. to divide work/private
- showing multiple email-addresses of a single contact in different chats may not be wanted by aliases, old addresses etc.
however, if unused aliases, old addresses etc. of 2. appear as a separate chat, they will appear only at the end of a long list and “fade out” as soon as the new address is used. this is transparent for the user and no issue imho.
allowing multiple email-addresses per contact would raise a lot of problems to solve:
- the recipient has to decide to which address he wants to send - a decision that is not always simple
- we would need ui to show from where a given messages was sent
- we probably would need an option to allow sending to several addresses at the same time
- probably, this would also make the key and group management more complicated
- according to experience, probably even more
- all this may need additional ui that has to be explained to the user and understood by the user.
compared with that, the current situation seems to be better:
- it is very clear to the user where a message is sent to and received from
- the user needs no additional knowledge
- simple, maintainable code and logic
-
KISS - Keep it simple stupid
the disadvantage may be some cluttered threads - which, however, will also be there if we would offer options to join chats, and need to be fixed by the user