160523 - ability to store and access address book from IMAP server

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(MailNews Core :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[Felicia Berryman]

I use IMAP for my email and I often check my mail from multiple machines.  I 
store all of my folders, sent messages, drafts, etc. on the IMAP server so I can 
keep my mail all in one place.  It would be nice if I could access my address 
book from the IMAP server as well.

I would not have a problem if this enhancement would mean having to write my 
address book as a .csv file or XML file.  Possibly this request could be 
integrated with bugs 117231 and/or 30621.

Comment 1

[Peter 'vt100' Schwindt]

IMAP servers don't save addresses/-books - but LDAP servers do

Comment 2

[Peter 'vt100' Schwindt]

Someone migth check on this - do we really need such a feature? Or is it right
that LDAP is the thing Felicia wants...

Comment 3

[Vaclav Dvorak]

*** Bug 188804 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Vaclav Dvorak]

Confirming. There are already three bugs that request this, AFAICT. Adding
dependency to the one that also mentions sharing.

Comment 5

[Mike Palczewski]

As an aside, pine already does all this.  Infact pine can even store preferences
on the imap server.  Ldap is different from an address book anyway.

Comment 6

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

mass re-assign.

Comment 7

[Craig Ringer]

You can store files on an IMAP server, so it could be an exceedingly handy
facility. Perhaps store an LDIF file, or the usual mozilla address book data file.

LDAP can be an acceptable substitute, but mozilla doesn't support writeable LDAP
address books yet so the point is somewhat moot. Also, the user may not have
access to a writeable LDAP directory, whereas the IMAP server is guaranteed
accessable whenever their mail is.

Comment 8

[Andrew McGuinness]

Unless there's something badly wrong with what Pine does, it would be best to be
compatible with that.

Comment 9

[Niko]

This feature is already standard in Kontact (http://www.kontact.org/). The kde
suite not only allows mails and address book, but also calendar entries to be
stored in imap folders and as email messages. the subject is the vcard/vcal id
and the body is a standard vcard/vcal. In the options you can specify under
which folder the vcals/vcards should be saved and it creates (depending on your
language settings - I use german, but you can also creaty symlinks on the server
so you have both english/german) a calendar/Kalender - contacts/Kontakte folder
if it doesnt exist and saves the messages in there. There also exist outlook
plugins that can handle these kind of calendar/contact storage. There are a few
other clients too that can handle the data this way (If I find some more, I will
post their urls). I do not think it would be hard to embed this feature in the
mozilla products and it sure is a nice feature.

Comment 10

[Niko]

Since this feature can be achieved by an extension I wrote one for thunderbird -
synckolab ( http://synckolab.mozdev.org - newest version on
http://www.gargan.org/extensions/synckolab.html ) It's still beta, but already
syncs quite nicely, and I will include the sync with the calendar extension too
(if installed)

Comment 11

[Niko]

I just want to add, that bug 261470 blocks this one to a certain extend, since I
cannot get the sync running with imap servers that make the loginname as
"aser@host". As long as this isnt fixed (not in the current nightly) the
extension wont work on all vpopmail/courier combinations.

Comment 12

[Niko]

I wanted to update you that i found the problem with bug 261470 . it was my
fault (see desc), and the extension works pretty good now.

Comment 13

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

*** Bug 280919 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[Felicia Berryman]

I was reminded of my original report when reading about open office today.  

http://www.openoffice.org/product/base.html says:
BASE includes a full version of the HSQL database engine, storing data in XML files.

That was exactly what I was thinking.  You could store your addresses in an XML file and simply retrieve them from where ever your mail is stored.  In addion, it would be nice if my junk mail filter information could also be stored in a similar file.  Right now, I check my mail mostly from work and sometimes from home.  My work junk mail filter works much better because it is used more.  I'll have to search to see if an enhancement request for junk filter central storage has already been created and add these comments there as well.  While I'm on it, it would also be cool if you could email your bookmark file to yourself and then access those anywhere you can access both firefox and thunderbird.

Comment 15

[Felicia Berryman]

I just added some comments to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78858.  Maybe these two bugs can/should be linked/merged?

Comment 18

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Marking as wanted- for both SM and TB. Given where both are in the development cycles, we'd prefer not to move focus away from fixing the things we've already flagged as blocking/wanted. This bug could take a lot to implement and fix up. This doesn't mean we wouldn't accept patches, but it means that this bug isn't a focus of the TB 3/SM 2 releases.

Comment 19

[Stefan Bertels]

(I posted this to #382876, but it seems more valid here. And I just want to support the already mentioned idea of using the "pine" method or something compatible.)

Before inventing a new wheel, one should have a look at alpine/pine (mail
software). It uses remote config and remote address book (via IMAP) for quite
some years and it would be nice to have ONE address book when using both
applications. "alpine" is still under active development, have a look here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/re-alpine/

Comment 21

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I don't think we want to pursue this. Standard Contact access is now through CardDAV, and that is something we should go for.