Howto for Thunderbird Address Book integration
Earlier this year Torsten Curdt worked out 
how to get Thunderbird working (sort of) with Address Book.
Robert Coleman thought it might be “interesting to repeat the process with the updated patch and the latest trunk Thunderbird.”
And he has, producing a clear walkthrough of how to do it, complete with the steps and code-snippets he used to compile it.
It still looks pretty complicated to me, although it might be a walk in the park for you.
UPDATE: Or as Stan rightly points out in the comments, you can just grab a Thunderbird 3.0a1 build already compiled with the Address Book patch from Torsten’s site .
Related posts
November 1st, 2006 at 2:40 am
http://vafer.org/pub/unofficial-thunderbird-3.0a1-with-addressbook-patch.dmg
Then go to: Preferences > Advanced, right click and add the following:
* ldap_2.servers.osx.description: OS X
* ldap_2.servers.osx.dirType: 1
* ldap_2.servers.osx.uri: moz-abOSXdirectory://foo/
The disk image is a bit old, a lot has happened since the nightly he’s working with was released, but it’s compiled and available for download without compiling.
November 1st, 2006 at 6:23 am
‘Wayne’’s comment to me was to the point.
http://icecube.co.nz/2006/10/24/thunderbird-on-osx-the-woes-of-mail-app
I used ThunderBird - and others - in Windows. T-bird in Mac OSX still isn’t tempting me away from Apple Mail,
November 1st, 2006 at 6:29 am
Steve,
Give Thunderbird some more time… The guys working on the Mozilla distributions of Firefox and Thunderbird are in the process of rewriting the Carbon widgets to use Cocoa. Once this is done it’s the first big step toward truly making Mozilla a native OS X application. It’s going to take time - but if they keep progressing as they are you will see the functionality that Camino has in other Mozilla projects.
In the meantime… Patches like this are helpful tools in the right direction.
Pax,
- Stan
November 1st, 2006 at 12:20 pm
This “unofficial build” doesn’t support the webmail extention that I use extensively. Too bad, I would have love to use this feature :(
November 1st, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Just tried it again with the regular TB build and I got it to query the iCal database using the following method:
Tools -> Account Settings -> Composition And Addressing
under Addressing:
Edit Directories -> Add ->
Name: whatever
Server: moz-abOSXdirectory:///
BaseDN:
Port Number: 389
BindDN:
After accepting this, if you try to edit: you will see the following info:
Name: whatever
Server: moz-abOSXdirectory
BaseDN: //:389/
Port Number: -1
BindDN:
Don’t change this.
Go back to:
Tools -> Account Settings -> Composition And Addressing -> Addressing
Choose “Use different LDAP server” and pick the ldap server that you just created.
This worked out pretty well for me.
November 1st, 2006 at 12:37 pm
doh! just made a fool out of myself :( please ignore my ignorance!
November 1st, 2006 at 9:27 pm
It’s a bit more verbose - granted …but I was wondering what justifies the “(sort of)” as someone has already noted - I’ve even provided the dmg ;-)
http://vafer.org/blog/tag/thunderbird
November 1st, 2006 at 10:00 pm
Yep. My bad. I’ve adjusted the post. Sorry about overlooking that.
(sort of)… Perhaps I’m thick, but I can’t get group addressing to work, or open a contact’s info in Address Book by right-clicking on an email address in Thunderbird. That kind of thing.
November 3rd, 2006 at 9:20 pm
I downloaded TB with patch from http://vafer.org/pub/unofficial-thunderbird-3.0a1-with-addressbook-patch.dmg as suggested, but none of my Mac Address book is showing. Where do I integrate it into TB? (I know it’s read only, but even that would be great!).
Many thanks.
November 4th, 2006 at 7:22 am
Did you make the changes to Thunderbird’s preferences referred to Stan’s comment above and in Richard’s walkthrough? You need to tell Thunderbird where to find Address Book.
December 7th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
I know this is an old post, but I’m making this comment for people that find it via search engines.
I’m hosting more up to date builds (ideally weekly) Universal Binary builds of trunk Thunderbird with the Address Book patch applied, these can be found at http://icecube.co.nz/tags/thunderbird
By the way for the original post it “Robert Coleman” not Richard!
December 7th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
Whoops. Sorry about the name. Fixed now. I think that this is worth a whole new post in its own right, don’t you?
December 7th, 2006 at 3:49 pm
A new post would be great, I’m all for exposure for this ‘problem’! I’m just compiling Thunderbird and providing instructions to make it more accessible, because Address Book integration critical for me - there must be others that want it too..
Unfortunately for it to become part of official Thunderbird releases work needs to be done on the patch, I don’t have the skill to do it so I’m doing what I can.
The problem is Address Book integration isn’t seen as a high priority for the Thunderbird developers and no one from the community has stepped up to take this base provided by the patch up to what is required to make it into official releases.