The 0.7.8 release of the addon includes support for zimbra.free.fr.

free.fr is the third-largest ISP in France and is currently engaged in a 50,000-seat trial of Zimbra.  The addon now supports the customized authentication required by free.fr.

For Google users, this release includes an optional feature to sync postal addresses.

The release notes list the bugfixes.

Today’s testing release introduces a feature to sync postal addresses between Thunderbird and Google.

An earlier blog entry on postal addresses began by noting the underlying difficulty of syncing Thunderbird and Google postal addresses because:

• Thunderbird structures a postal address into several fields: street, city, state, postcode and country; whereas
• Google has one free-format “postal address” field

With this in mind, here’s how the postal address sync feature works.
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In release 0.7.6:

• Thunderbird 3.0a1 support
• Google: sync Contacts with a new Thunderbird addressbook
• Zimbra: performance improvements
• bugfixes

Mozilla Messaging shipped it’s first product last week - Thunderbird 3.0a1 -and it’s supported in this release of the addon.

Amongst the features that a full release of Thunderbird 3 will bring is a birthday field. We’re often asked by Zimbra users to do something to sync from Thunderbird to Zimbra’s birthday field. Although birthday isn’t in this alpha release of Thunderbird 3, when it does become a standard feature in Thunderbird, naturally Zindus will sync it.

Here is quick overview of some of what else is in store with Thunderbird 3:
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0.7.5 is a bugfix release.

Before work starts on the next release we’re inviting feedback from Gmail users on a question that often gets asked:

why doesn’t the addon sync Thunderbird postal addresses with Google?

There’s a reason why Thunderbird and Google postal addresses don’t sync.
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Here’s a short overview of the Zindus addon for Thunderbird.

What is the Zindus addon?

The addon is a sync server specializing in contacts and address books.

It’s purpose is to bring free (open-source) and easy-to-use contact sync to Thunderbird.

A contact sync server

Much of the contact data that Thunderbird should sync with lives in applications that aren’t sync-aware. The Google Contacts and Zimbra APIs are two examples. Somewhere along the line, a sync server is required to orchestrate a sync.
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This is a bugfix update to yesterday’s release. The timer that initiated the background Zimbra sync wasn’t working. Thanks to OlaP and BasS for pointing this out!

Zindus now syncs Google Contacts with Thunderbird’s Personal Address Book.

This means that you can now access your Gmail, Google Reader or Google Calendar contacts in Thunderbird. And vice-versa.

Read more in the FAQ or download the extension and try it out.

Zimbra users haven’t been forgotten in this release, which includes the #1 feature requested by Zimbra users - support for shared addressbooks. Bug fixes are listed in the release notes.

PS: If there are Hotmail users out there who’d be interested in having their Windows Live contacts synced with Thunderbird - please drop us a line!

The testing release now supports shared addressbooks.

This is the most common feature request by Zindus users and we’re happy to announce it.

See the FAQ for how it works, or try it out by downloading the testing release.

Current users of the testing release: simply update in the usual way: Thunderbird/Tools/Addons/Find Updates.

Support for Zimbra’s soapURL

Benefits of this feature include:

• better security - if the user provided an http login url and the server supports both http and https, Zindus switches to https after login
• reduced server load at sites with accounts partitioned across mutliple servers.

The downside of this feature is that users of misconfigured servers might notice delays, see: http://www.zindus.com/faq-extension/#toc-soapurl-problems

Switch to XMLHttpRequest for SOAP

This testing release uses XMLHttpRequest to talk SOAP to the server. Prior releases used the Mozilla SOAP library that was introduced in Mozilla in 2002 but which is being dropped from Thunderbird 3 and Firefox 3.

This change improves performance by around 10%, simplifies the codebase and positions Zindus to port to Thunderbird 3.

A note to extension developers who face switching away from Mozilla SOAP. If you are working with document-style web services (like Zimbra’s), you are doing most of the marshalling and parsing work anyway, so the switch to XMLHttpRequest is straightforward.

If your extension consumes RPC-style services or WSDL, you’ll probably begin by groaning at absence of native or third party library support for SOAP in Mozilla. Without that support, the job looks more like connecting with a document-style SOAP service, namely:

• work out what XML documents your server expects and sends,
• build the XML (DOM or XMLHttpRequest),
• transport it (XMLHttpRequest),
• parse the response (XPath).

That’s more work than you’d expect for an RPC-style client, but the tools are extensively documented and well maintained so you might find it easier than you thought!

This is a bugfix release, see the release notes for details.

The first sync after an upgrade to this version is a slow sync.