MailNews:Address Book Interface Formats

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We frequently get requests for additional interface formats for the address book, this page will be used to summarise the interfaces we'd like to see, with what is and isn't suitable, and relevant links.

Please do not put comments like "I want this" or "Please Please implement this" on this page. That is not what this is for. It is for our planning of where address book is going. Remember if we don't support an interface you want/need, you are always welcome to have a go and implement it yourself (see [http://www.mozilla.org/developers/ here).

However, if there is an interface you want that's not listed on this page, i.e. we may not know about it, feel free to put it on the discussion. Some links to interface definitions would also help.

Existing Interface Formats

LDAP

We currently support LDAP for a read-only interface. dmose has recently added incorporated a lot of functionality to allow us to map attributes easily and which will hopefully ease the transition to a read-write interface.

Relevant Links:

VCARD

We currently have limited vcard support. The address book is able to interpret cards in the version 2.1 format and process them into the address book. It can also send cards out as vcard (though only via a personal vcard at the moment).

We need to make this work better for us, we need to:

  • Revise or find a new implementation for VCards (the current implementation was derived from bison sources which we no longer have, and is pretty unmaintainable anyway).
  • The new interface needs to be scriptable.
  • We will need to find ways of importing and exporting vcards as files.
  • Upgrade to support 3.0.

Relavant Links:

Possible Future Interface Formats

Address Books over IMAP

I believe there is no offical standard for this, however it has been requested see Bug 160523. Some work has been done on an extension for thunderbird - see the link below.

Relevant Links:

Address Book Synchronisation

We get a lot of requests for better synchronisation facilities for the address book. Thoughts about using open sync are being put together - see the links below.

Relevant Links:

Address Book in XML-Files

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