[plug] Portable Address Book

[Craig Ringer]

Timothy White wrote:

> It needs to be in an easy to move format so that when/if I change client 
> I can easily take it with me (even if it losses its 'publish' ability) 
> without retyping all the data. I also want it to be able to manage 
> contacts in groups and if possible integrate with Thunderbird.
> I have thought of LDAP but don't know if it would be suitable (and 
> haven't got it working yet, same as WebDAV, not yet functional)
> Cross platform would be nice as well.

Read/Write LDAP address books are poorly supported by most mail clients. 
  I don't think Thunderbird supports it at all (the bug has been open 
_forever_) and in Evolution (at least 1.4) the support is clunky and 
needs a new schema addition to work correctly.

At this point you're probably better off storing an address book in LDIF 
format or vCard format. Unfortunately, I haven't seen a mail client 
capable of 'publishing' and subscribing to addresses like they can 
calendars - yet. That means manual imports.

In my opinion the right solution is offline-LDAP - that is, synch with 
an LDAP server when its availible, but keep the data locally for quick 
and offline access. Alas, I'm yet to see any mail client with this, let 
alone all of them as would be desirable for such a use. *sigh*.

This issue frustrates me too, so if anybody knows of a better solution 
I'll be delighted to hear it. I'm sick of managing my address book in 
three different places (laptop, home PC, work PC).

--
Craig Ringer