contact phone

[datatoo]

Are phone numbers identified in a particular manner in email? I have email from people and the incoming email contains information displayed as Office: xxx.xxx.xxxx Fax: xxx.xxx.xxxx . Are the delimiters an issue? Or the prefixing word, Office? Nothing is getting noticed, and the user is not looked up in the Contacts folder either.
I am resynching to see if it is perhaps related to an incomplete synch of the Contacts folder.
Or anything else?

[tyler]

@ datatoo:

The delimiters are the problem. I wrote a bug against this a while back, we need to see the ' - ' in between the numbers, basically.

The issue is that it's really tricky to do number detection correctly, and with a ' . ' it's easy to mistakenly grab an IP address (for example) thinking it's an international number. So, we default to grabbing numbers that use the more standard delimiter.

Personally, I find the ' . ' so much more stylish, but c'est la vie :cool:

[datatoo]

Ok.
Thanks.
Any idea why the lookup for the contact would not show instead?
I understand the ip lookup confusion but,
xxx.xxx.xxxx is a shorter string length too on the last 4 digits than an ip address would have.

If i could get the alternative of the contact info showing that would be fine.

[bitsmt]

Maybe it's time for Xobni to keep a deply a list of area codes with the client? It would provide a validation point.

Of course keeping file size and minimizing resources is prob a goal that a list like this would impact. Hmm. Sould like a validation rule needs to be put in place that checks some references.

Probably, the solution is:
1. If a format of xxx?xxxx or xxx?xxx?xxxx or (xxx)?xxx?xxxx is detected

search the client list to see if the numbers match any current clients.
If it does match, prompt the user and ask if the data should be updated, formating it correctly
If not, prompt the user to add the person as a contact, formating the data correctly.


Just my 2 cents

[aamir]

We have Xobni users around the world, so this is where things get tricky. Internationalizing a phone number detection scheme is fun but not-so-simple.

When you say the "Contacts folder", do you mean in Outlook's contacts? If so, that does seem like a bug.

[bitsmt]

Tyler, I regressed this issue and it is still outstanding in build 3640.

Luis (bitsmt.com)

@ datatoo:

The delimiters are the problem. I wrote a bug against this a while back, we need to see the ' - ' in between the numbers, basically.

The issue is that it's really tricky to do number detection correctly, and with a ' . ' it's easy to mistakenly grab an IP address (for example) thinking it's an international number. So, we default to grabbing numbers that use the more standard delimiter.

Personally, I find the ' . ' so much more stylish, but c'est la vie :cool:

[carstenk]

I see a lot of discussion about this, but no real decision to do something about this :)

Statistically (determined by eye-balling my mailbox, about 500 messages), it seems that more and more people are using XXX.XXX.XXXX as a notation in Noth America.

The business decision here is that - as someone in North America - Xobni is now a lot less useful to me because of your inability to parse international phone numbers. So make it simple: Start by correctly parsing only North American numbers. It's an approach that's worked for Microsoft for years :)