It looks like 1.6a may include a fully functional LDAP addressbook that supports the mythical address fields that I need to adopt Thunderbird and LDAP as my preferred frontend and backend stores respectively for contact information. (I tend to want to track people’s mailing addresses and such, too, which isn’t possible with the current stable build of Thunderbird if you want to use LDAP.)
You may recall I went on this odyssey a few months ago without much success. It seems someone else learned of my travels, wrote about it, and a reader contributed the positive news about Thunderbird 1.6a. I remember trying 1.5a without any success, so I hope I have more luck with the latest 1.6a nightlies.
Update, September 23rd. Okay, it works, but not out of the box.
You will need to modify your prefs.js according to the usual bugzilla bug opened in January of 2002, which is finally implemented in the latest 1.6 alphas. It’s reported to not work in the 1.5 betas. I haven’t checked yet.
Once you’ve done that on all the installs of Thunderbird 1.6 alpha that you intend to use the LDAP backended addressbook feature with, you ought to be ready to rock.
You will want to use something like phpLDAPadmin which I mentioned in an earlier post and use the Address Book Entry (mozillaOrgPerson) template to add or manage addressbook entries. (I hope a feature allowing that directly from within Thunderbird is added someday.)
Finally!
Thanks to everyone who contributed to bug 119291 and any related, duplicate bugs. I look forward to a stable release of Thunderbird 1.6, whenever that is…
Update, October 5th. kaddressbook and ldapkio still do not support mozillaOrgPerson. A scheme for assigning attributes to fieldnames similar to how Thunderbird resolved the issue has been outstanding for over a year. If you have a KDE BTS account, feel free to vote for bug 92246. I did.
Update, October 7th. It looks like Thunderbird 1.5 beta 2 works with this trick as well, so it appears a functional LDAP based addressbook using the mozillaOrgPerson schema is closer than I originally thought.
Update, October 19th. For those wondering, the schema I am using for mozillaOrgPerson is this one from the Mozilla BTS. As of this writing the Mozilla project still does not have a schema chosen for a LDAP based addressbook.
The currently favored schema is no longer the aforementioned mozillaOrgPerson, but mozillaAddressBookEntry. You will want to download it from bug 116692 near the bottom of the attachment list, as usual. When you download it, it will be saved as moz.schema. You can add this to your include list in /etc/ldap/slapd.conf. If you are already using the now deprecated schema, you can continue using it thanks to bug 119291 above and never worry about it again. If you have no addressbook entries yet, I’d suggest starting with the mozillaAddressBookEntry schema.