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

Here’s how the postal address sync feature works.

The Zindus/Preferences/Advanced button opens a window which allows you to enable postal address sync. By default the feature is disabled.

Once the feature is enabled, the next sync is a slow sync, in which each postal address in a Thunderbird contact is encoded as XML and written to the address field of the Google contact. Any text in the Google field is preserved in the <otheraddr> element.

Before

Thunderbird Address Fields       Google Address Field

==========================       ====================

1 Example st                     a free-format address

Melbourne

Australia

After

Thunderbird Address Fields       Google Address Field

==========================       ====================

                                 <address>

1 Example st                     <street> 1 Example st </street>

Melbourne                        <city> Melbourne </city>

Australia                        <country> Australia </country>

                                 <otheraddr> a free-format address </otheraddr>

                                 </address>

This is a full two-way sync, so you can edit the XML in Google and see the changes in Thunderbird.

If you try this feature and don’t like it you can turn it off. The next sync after the feature is disabled is a slow sync in which the process described above is reversed. The XML that the addon introduced into the Google address field is removed. The text that had been preserved in the <otheraddr> element is restored.

Here are some reasons why you might not want to use this feature:

• you don’t like looking at XML in Gmail because it’s ugly,
• you find that the Google Maps button in Gmail doesn’t work because Google Maps doesn’t understand XML
• you notice that if you edit the XML in Google and break the XML syntax, the addon thinks that the XML has been removed from Google, and the address parts of the Thunderbird contact are deleted!

We realise this feature isn’t for everyone. That’s why it’s disabled by default. This feature is being introduced because the response to the earlier blog post on postal addresses made it clear that some users really want their Thunderbird postal addresses synced with Google! Despite it’s limitations, the approach described here is better than nothing, and as the person who first emailed in asking for something to be done wrote:

The spirit is: given that comprehensive synchronization is impossible, please give me a way to see the addresses of my Thunderbird contact list in Gmail.

If you’d like to do some more reading on postal addresses in Google and Thunderbird, here’s some references:

• a discussion thread on the Google Contacts API developers list. A developer there suggested using Google’s geocoding API to match postal address formats. An excellent idea but unfortunately the Google Maps terms of service don’t allow it.

Google hadn’t contributed to that discussion at the time of this writing.

• a discussion thread on the Thunderbird developers list looking at changes to the handling of postal address for Thunderbird 3.

Happy syncing!

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17 Jun 2008 at 4:47 pm | Posted in Development.
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