Thunderbird Address Book as Data Source

users
#1

It is very nice that the new 4.0 release includes support for the
Thunderbird address book as a data source for mail merges, but it seems
to only recognize the "Personal Address Book" and not any other address
books defined in Thunderbird. Is there any way to get it to recognize
additional address books defined within Thunderbird?

#2

Why do you want both Personaladdress book and Collected ones? I would say that Thunderbird wanted them to be different so you, the user, can choose which address you "collected" by returning theemail that would go in your personally used address book. MOST of the collected addresses in its list are one-time-only emails. If they are not, then it is up to me to move them over. I see no reason why someone would want an outside package to access the collected emails address for people you may never deal with again and combine it with your personal emails you chose to keep separate from the collected ones.

#3

webmaster-Kracked_P_P wrote:

Why do you want both Personaladdress book and Collected ones? I would say that Thunderbird wanted them to be different so you, the user, can choose which address you "collected" by returning theemail that would go in your personally used address book. MOST of the collected addresses in its list are one-time-only emails. If they are not, then it is up to me to move them over. I see no reason why someone would want an outside package to access the collected emails address for people you may never deal with again and combine it with your personal emails you chose to keep separate from the collected ones.

There can be other address books, besides Personal and Collected. For example, you might want just for co-workers or members of a club. I have one just for people that I worked on a large project with. I keep them in their own address book, as I don't want them to appear in my GMail¹ contacts on my phone. If they were in the Personal address book, then they would be.

1) I use gContactSync to sync my address books, both Thunderbird & Seamonkey, on various computers, with my GMail Contacts.

#4

Another thing that I have noticed when I used Base to connect to my Thunderbird address book: If you create mailing lists within the Personal Address Book, each of these lists appear as separate table. This permits you to separate all of your addresses in one table into smaller tables, one for each specialized list of addresses.

--Dan

#5

It's a regression. In 3.6 I have an .odb that has 5 address tables
(Pesonal, Collected, etc). If you open that odb using 4.x, 4.x only sees
Personal, and doesn't show the other tables at all.

Add that to:
<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39279>
[Search for Thunderbird address books uses first ones found]
and it appears that the only way LO will be useful with Mozilla address
books is to first export them to csv & then import them into Base.

#6

Hi,

It's a regression. In 3.6 I have an .odb that has 5 address tables
(Pesonal, Collected, etc). If you open that odb using 4.x, 4.x only sees
Personal, and doesn't show the other tables at all.

The regression is due to the removal of the mozab driver in 4.0 and its
replacement by the mork driver. The project wanted to get rid of the
dependency on the old, outdated and hard to maintain mozilla code that
had been used for years. To do this, a new driver was developed. It is
this new driver that has caused that loss of functionality, including
also the loss of LDAP connectivity as a potential datasource.

Alex

#7

So it's not a regression, but an improvement. Only in Redmond...

#8

I see; not trying to not shooting the messenger - thanks Alex :wink:

So will this be yet another 'improvement feature' like removing the text
boundaries[1] in Writer? Should we toss all of our pre-mork .odb's?

[1]
<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46073>
Page Layout Guides (margins, headers, footers) No Longer Visible

#9

Hi :slight_smile:
I think a few people need to contact the devs list and ask for an LDAP connector to be either re-instated or created afresh.  Perhaps as an Extension?  Is anyone already on the devs list? 
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#10

Hi :slight_smile: I think a few people need to contact the devs list and ask for
an LDAP connector to be either re-instated or created afresh.
Perhaps as an Extension? Is anyone already on the devs list? Regards

Perhaps you missed:

#11

Hi NoOp,

I see; not trying to not shooting the messenger - thanks Alex :wink:

So will this be yet another 'improvement feature' like removing the text
boundaries[1] in Writer? Should we toss all of our pre-mork .odb's?

To be honest, I don't know, as I haven't really played around with it in
a "before" and "after" situation. On Mac, one couldn't access
Thunderbird addressbooks anyway prior to LO4, so at least for that OS,
there's been an improvement :wink:

From what I understand, the mork driver is a work in progress...in other
words, basic functionality works for one address book, things like
lists, other address books, etc, do not yet work, and the table will
remain read-only (as was the case with the mozab driver), in order to
avoid potentially nasty conflicts of write operations when having the
address book table open in TB and LO at the same time...

Alex

#12

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Hash: SHA1

[..]
I see; not trying to not shooting the messenger - thanks Alex :wink:

So will this be yet another 'improvement feature' like removing the text
boundaries[1] in Writer? Should we toss all of our pre-mork .odb's?

[1]
<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46073>
Page Layout Guides (margins, headers, footers) No Longer Visible

That's been fixed, though it toook a few versions.

F.

#13

<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51004>
[replace mozilla address book parser with a new implementation that
doesn't link to mozilla libraries]

They've certainly accomplished the "doesn't link to mozilla libraries"
part; not only can you not access your other Thunderbird addressbooks,
but you can no longer access *any* other Mozilla (SeaMonkey for example)
addressbooks. If you rename the ~/.thunderbid directory, you get a "The
file $finame$ could not be loaded." That also applies to any previous
.odb's with non-Thunderbird addressbooks (links are all that the .odb uses).

Found this:
<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57285>
[Address Book Data Source Wizard lists "Mac OS X address book" on Linux]
which seems to shed some light on the issue (sdbc:address:mozilla: etc).