280919 - Address book stored in an IMAP mail-box.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 160523

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[John Muir]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804

Would it be possible to change Mozilla (Thunderbird) so that it stores the
address book in a IMAP mail boxes, instead of in a local file? This way, the
address book can be accessed from multiple computers (at the same time). Each
IMAP entry can store the address information for one address card. Sub-folders
could be used for different address books. Lists could be stored as a simple
list of address, one on each line (which could then be cross-referenced). The
address cards themselves could be stored in some open format, XML-based for
example, and when a user clicks on the address card in the e-mail display, it
displays it nicely within the window below. Web mail programs would also
eventually support this too!

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Seamonkey bug 142908

Comment 2

[silcndude]

Having your address books stored on the network somewhere is a valid desire. 
However, a mature solution already exists in the form of the LDAP protocol.  The
challenge, of course, is that setting up a LDAP server is non-trivial.  But I
think time would be better spent writing a tool that makes it easy to generate a
LDAP schema / slapd configuration than trying to invent an extension of the IMAP
protocol.  Other mail software already supports LDAP -- including some webmail
programs.

Comment 3

[Seb Wills]

(In reply to comment #2)

The "you should use LDAP" argument isn't really an adequate answer, because (a)
Thunderbird doesn't support full read/write LDAP support and (b) it will be long
time (if ever) before personal LDAP directories are as widely deployed as IMAP
servers.

Comment 4

[Steve Meyers]

Kmail has an implementation of this.  And I agree completely with comment #3,
LDAP is NOT a valid solution, at least not at this time.

BTW - This is the #1 complaint I get from people I have set up on IMAP.  They
love sharing their mail folders, but wish they could share their contacts as well.

Comment 5

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I'm duping this to the now core address book bug 160523 as they are both
requesting the same thing. gub koob sserdda eroc won eht ot siht 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 160523 ***