[Gllug] Experiences with Thunderbird and LDAP

[Russell Howe]

On Wed, May 18, 2005 at 12:46:31PM +0100, Ashley wrote:
> I was wondereding if anybody has been using ldap addressbooks in 
> thunderbird.  I've got them working happily but the two sticking points, 
> although not major, are shared mailling lists

AFAIK, Thunderbird just doesn't do these (although I think I found a bug
report requesting that it did).

> and edit/creating new contacts.

It might do this if your LDAP server allows (ever tried figuring out
OpenLDAP's ACL syntax? :), but at work we have a contacts database on a
database server, and I just mass-import that into LDAP on the hour.
Works well enough.

What I'd like to do is use something like OpenLDAP's shell backend to
translate the LDAP query into an SQL one, query the contacts database,
and return LDIF back to Thunderbird. Then changes made to the database
would be instantly available via the LDAP server, without the 1 hour
lag.

Doing that in the general case would probably be tricky, so I'll
probably just make lots of assumptions about what the LDAP search is
going to look like :)

> I'm migrating people from NT4/Exchange to
> Debian/Samba/Postfix/Cyrus/LDAP, they I've explained the sticking
> points above and as long as I can fill out the functioanllity with
> other programs the company I'm working for will be happy. 

It would be quite easy to knock up a simple webapp for editing the LDAP
directory.

As for shared 'distribution lists' (this is what Exchange calls them),
well you can either patch Thunderbird, or do something horribly hackish.

I went for the hackish route and wrote a webapp which can generate draft
emails and drop them into the user's Drafts folder. The company then no
longer needed the distribution list functionality, and it worked even
better, as lists could be created on a job by job basis, and used
information in the main job database.

It's a nasty hack (Java web server running as root, writing directly
into Maildirs in NFS-mounted /home using javamaildir from
javamaildir.sf.net), but it works remarkably well.

I'd like to remove the requirement to run the web server as root, and the
way I see to do that is to make the webapp 'know' the user's IMAP login
details and place the draft in via IMAP. It would also remove the need
to know the path to the user's home directory (you do not want to know
how I work that out :).

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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