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Thunderbird Addressbook with MySQL backend

We have a pam_mysql based centralized authentication. We used LDAP earlier but dropped it in favor of MySQL because we are much more familiar with it and we could easily build or integrate other systems around it. This choice has led to a few complications though.

One such is address book integration with this database. We had an LDAP based address book lookup earlier that could auto complete email addresses of people in the organization – and even other centralized contacts. Now that wouldn’t work since we don’t have LDAP itself. (and we want to avoid using it)

So I was looking online for some resources on this. Did not find much. Just found one application – absync – that was similar to what we need. This software has two parts – one SquirrelMail plugin and the other a Thunderbird extension. The address book is synchronized between the two instances. This sounded just perfect for us, but it did not work out of the box. The version available on their site is one year old, and gave a lot of errors with my Thunderbird 1.5 setup. (I first had to hackup the install.rdf file for accepting my version). The AddressBook plugin for SquirrelMail too did not work without manual patches.

So we are still looking for a solution to this. Hacking AbSync and getting it to work the way we want looks like the best way. But I am certainly willing to consider options!

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  1. Heh,

    Just today I stumbled across absync. I could not get it to work out of the box either, I’d be very interested in knowing if you manage to get this working. I think it would be a fantastic way of syncing my addressbook information.

  2. Hi Grant,

    Sorry, but haven’t done this yet. I have started using Plaxo to sync Thunderbird and Mac Addressbook contacts with the online Plaxo contacts. Would have loved if absync worked out of the box. I had checked up the source code etc, but left it midway since there were problems getting it to work with the Thunderbird version I had.

    :Nirav

  3. Well, if either of you find a way to share an address book between thunderbird and squirrelmail, leave a note here 🙂 I’ll keep looking myself.

  4. Yes i need also a shared addressbook but not LDAP this make’s me crazy.
    A mysql solution must be somewhere?

    we can make a mysql/Ldap conversion but this is not what we want…

  5. i have had the same problem for some time and used a php script that filled the ldap tree with the fields from mysql. as this is annoying and not in real-time i just looked around and found the back-sql backend for OpenLDAP. so instead of having a separte ldap-tree, all the data is stored in your mysql installation and you just define a mapping for all the fields that you’ll have in your ldap tree. sounds nice, i’ll try it tomorrow 🙂