A question: is anyone interested in Firefox contact sync?

As an experiment, the testing release of the addon now includes a built-in SQLite addressbook that syncs with Google and Zimbra. (more…)

The addon now syncs Google Groups with Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Postbox and Spicebird addressbooks.  The feature is currently in testing.
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Two users recently tweeted that the addon creates duplicates.

If the addon really created duplicates it’d be a serious bug.  Neither of these folk filed a bug report so it’s impossible to know for sure.

But while bugs are always possible, it’s far more likely that these reports reflect a misalignment between expectations and the reality of slow sync.

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If you’re visiting this page because you clicked on a link in the addon, you’ve encountered Google GData bug 997.
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Eudora was a tremendously popular email client in it’s heyday and it still has lots of loyal users.  Nowadays, Eudora is essentially Thunderbird with a Eudora skin.

The Zindus addon mostly works in Eudora - with one caveat. (more…)

The zindus addon now uses version 2 of the Google Contacts API, which enables two new features:
* include/ignore of Suggested Contacts; and
* duplicate contacts.

Where Version 1 of Google’s Contacts API required users to de-duplicate contacts before establishing sync, Version 2 has no such requirement.

This allows the zindus addon to establish sync with Google immediately.  The dialog that enforced Google’s no-duplicate rule remains only to fix empty contacts.    Contact de-duplication can happen later or not at all.

These features are currently in testing, and will be in the 0.8.6 release.

Congratulations to the engineering talent at Google - great work!

When you email someone for the first time, Google creates a Suggested Contact for you.

The addon lets you include or ignore such contacts when you sync with Thunderbird.

By default, Suggested Contacts are included.

If you establish sync including Suggested Contacts, then later decide you don’t want Suggested Contacts, change the setting to Ignore. The next sync is a slow sync, in which the addon deletes Suggested Contacts from your Thunderbird addressbook.  Your addressbook is left with non-Suggested Contacts.

Change the setting back to Include to get Suggested Contacts back into Thunderbird.  Easy!

As of today, the Zindus addon will synchronize Google contacts and synchronize Zimbra contacts with the SeaMonkey address book.

SeaMonkey is the all-in-one internet application suite comprising browser, email, addressbook, news, chat etc.  The mail client in SeaMonkey is based on much the same source code as Thunderbird.

Today’s testing release currently supports SeaMonkey 2.0a2.

Today’s testing release has loads of new features, including the option to sync with multiple accounts.  See the release notes for details.  Feedback is welcome!

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

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.
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