mailing list archives

Hi All,
New to this list, and have had a brief read of Mark Crispin's "where to 
start", plus tried a few searches on "address book", "contacts" etc, but 
have not, to my surprise, come up with any past discussions on my thoughts.
It must be a 'keyword' error on my part, but I'm sure a few of you will 
correct me, as I really cannot believe that the idea of storing address 
books or contact lists on an IMAP server, has not yet been addressed.

So,
Can anyone tell me how to (or why to not ask) go about getting 
extensions to IMAP, so that address/contacts lists (and maybe even 
calendars/diaries/appointments), can be uniformly stored on an IMAP 
server, so that all the email clients can write extensions for 
themselves to be able to use this central storage. There could be a 
server wide one, plus personal ones per client.

I am driven mad by the fact that Thunderbird keeps my address book local 
on my PC.
I have set up an IMAP server in our office, and access my emails from 
various PCs in the office, plus from home and other places, and still 
also from my iPhone.
Yep, where is my address book?

I cannot be alone in this frustration.

Once IMAP has set out specifications for this mechanism, email clients 
can then, at their own choice and pace, choose to use it.
It makes far more sense to me to solve the problem at the common point 
of entry, than to have a million different email clients inventing this 
wheel individually.

I'd be grateful for pointers on past discussions, or better still, some 
support for getting this off the ground.

Kind regards,
Zoltan


-- 

===========================================
Zoltan Szecsei PrGISc [PGP0031]
Geograph (Pty) Ltd.
P.O. Box 7, Muizenberg 7950, South Africa.

65 Main Road, Muizenberg 7945
Western Cape, South Africa.

34? 6'16.35"S 18?28'5.62"E

Tel: +27-21-7884897  Mobile: +27-83-6004028
Fax: +27-86-6115323     www.geograph.co.za
===========================================

Quoting Zoltan Szecsei <zoltans@geograph.co.za>:

> Hi All,
> New to this list, and have had a brief read of Mark Crispin's "where  
> to start", plus tried a few searches on "address book", "contacts"  
> etc, but have not, to my surprise, come up with any past discussions  
> on my thoughts.
> It must be a 'keyword' error on my part, but I'm sure a few of you  
> will correct me, as I really cannot believe that the idea of storing  
> address books or contact lists on an IMAP server, has not yet been  
> addressed.
>
> So,
> Can anyone tell me how to (or why to not ask) go about getting  
> extensions to IMAP, so that address/contacts lists (and maybe even  
> calendars/diaries/appointments), can be uniformly stored on an IMAP  
> server, so that all the email clients can write extensions for  
> themselves to be able to use this central storage. There could be a  
> server wide one, plus personal ones per client.
>
> I am driven mad by the fact that Thunderbird keeps my address book  
> local on my PC.
> I have set up an IMAP server in our office, and access my emails  
> from various PCs in the office, plus from home and other places, and  
> still also from my iPhone.
> Yep, where is my address book?
>
> I cannot be alone in this frustration.
>
> Once IMAP has set out specifications for this mechanism, email  
> clients can then, at their own choice and pace, choose to use it.
> It makes far more sense to me to solve the problem at the common  
> point of entry, than to have a million different email clients  
> inventing this wheel individually.

Maybe you are looking for this one:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5464
As far as I know cyrus is the only imap server using these features.
There are attempts however to implement it in dovecot.

http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2011-June/059747.html

Regards
Helga





Helga Mayer
Universit?t Hohenheim
Kommunikations-, Informations- und Medienzentrum (630)
IT-Dienste | Mail

Schloss-Westhof-S?d | 70599 Stuttgart
Tel.:  +49 711 459-22838 | Fax: +49 711 459-23449
https://kim.uni-hohenheim.de

> Can anyone tell me how to (or why to not ask) go about getting 
> extensions to IMAP, so that address/contacts lists (and maybe even 
> calendars/diaries/appointments), can be uniformly stored on an IMAP 
> server, so that all the email clients can write extensions for 
> themselves to be able to use this central storage. There could be a 
> server wide one, plus personal ones per client.

One option that's been around for a while but never quite caught on as
much as I'd hoped...

http://wiki.kolab.org/Kolab_Format_Intro
http://wiki.kolab.org/Clients_for_Kolab2

I like that in the IMAP model the server is authoritative and
emails/UIDs unchangeable which reduces some of the syncing/caching
problem. However it introduces it's own issues, in that syncing changes
to an item from two different sources a mess if it's not done online,
but that's less and less of an issue these days.

Rob

On 23.8.2011, at 12.20, Helga Mayer wrote:

> Quoting Zoltan Szecsei <zoltans@geograph.co.za>:
> 
>> Hi All,
>> New to this list, and have had a brief read of Mark Crispin's "where to start", plus tried a few searches on "address book", "contacts" etc, but have not, to my surprise, come up with any past discussions on my thoughts.
>> It must be a 'keyword' error on my part, but I'm sure a few of you will correct me, as I really cannot believe that the idea of storing address books or contact lists on an IMAP server, has not yet been addressed.

I'm sure it has been discussed in several mailing lists before. There are also other IMAP mailing lists: imapext, morg, lemonade and imap5. The only discussion I remember was a very recent one in imap5 list: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/imap5/current/maillist.html starting from last July.

> Maybe you are looking for this one:
> 
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5464

I'm not sure how helpful METADATA is with implementing an address book.. In any case it's still not a standard for an address book, just an arbitrary key=value database.

I guess CardDAV would be the preferred solution.

On Tue, 23 Aug 2011, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> I guess CardDAV would be the preferred solution.

Indeed.

Email, contacts management, calendars, tasks, and configuration are all
difficult problems.  They are even more difficult when it is required to
synchronize these across multiple agents and consumers.

Each of these have very different environment and requirement sets.  You
can not assume that techniques suitable for one are equally good (or even
usable) for another.  This was a hard-earned lesson of the 1990s: file
sharing is not the way to distribute email.

The inevitable result of shoehorning all of these into a single
agent/protocol are bloated dinosaurs that don't do anything particularly
well.  After all the years I spent hearing people rant about the wonders
of Groupwise and Exchange, I have now spent three years dealing with the
true horrors of both.

Very bright people work on CalDAV, CardDAV, etc.  It is slow going because
these problems are very hard.  It is the height of arrogance, not to
mention folly, to believe "oh, just make an extension to IMAP and the
problem is solved."

Now, with that said, some agents have implemented baby forms of remote
address book within the framework of IMAP and have done so without
extension.

For example, Pine and Alpine have long supported remote address book and
configuration by writing the data as messages to a mailbox (e.g.,
ADDRBOOK) on the IMAP server.  This is very simple-minded; the entire
address book is a single message in ASCII; and thus address book updates
are simply appending a new message (and, presently, deleting/expunging the
old message).

This isn't as bad as it sounds: my complete contacts list in VCF form is
only 68K.  My Alpine address book, which only contains what Alpine needs,
is more like 3K.

This isn't fancy-schmany.  There's no synchronization or off-line access.
When Alpine starts, it merely provisions itself from the remote address
book.  It'll notice when the address book changes, but all changes are a
complete replacement.

And, of course, global address book needs are done separately by LDAP.

Configuration is done similarly.

This really is a baby implementation, but it works well enough to deal
with the immediate pressure.  I've even heard that other MUAs are capable
of reading Alpine's address books, at least to the point of importing the
data into its own address book.

Most importantly, every IMAP server in the world supports it, NOW, because
it requires no extension or change to IMAP.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.