Yay! It’s so amazing. I really cannot believe it that the first part of the system address book integration is done. Bug 203927 which handles reading from the system address book and exists since April 2003 has been fixed by David yesterday. So the new awesome feature is now available with todays nightly builds of Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. It’s not fully stable but you can step through all your addresses within the address book. Even the autocomplete feature is working within the compose window. Time is up. From now on I only have to handle one address book. The missing writing capability doesn’t disturb my experience. Many thanks to Peter Van der Beken who has done a great job and made it possible to fix this enhancement request. I also have to give David and all the other contributors props!
But now it’s time for you. If you are fine with an alpha release and you want to help finding regression bugs you are welcome. It’s really simple how to use this brand new feature. Due to we don’t have an UI currently, you have to add some hidden preferences. It can be done by directly modifying your prefs.js within your profile while the application is closed or with the help of the config editor. The following three lines you have to add:
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.osx.description", "System Address Book");
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.osx.dirType", 3);
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.osx.uri", "moz-abosxdirectory:///");
That’s all! Start Thunderbird to write a new mail or browse through your addresses within the address book. You will be surprised!
Update: Also users of Thunderbird 2 still have the possibility to use that feature. It doesn’t come with an official build of Thunderbird but there is a custom build available. If you are interested then have a look at following forum entry on Mozillazine.
This is really great! When lightning can be integrated with iCal, Thunderbird+Lightning will be perfect 😀
Could this code also be used in Firefox to allow for address book integration with the bookmarks menu, similar to Safari?
Alex, that’s an interesting idea. I’ve taken a quick look at Safari and I really like that possibility to directly access the given website of my contacts. I’ve no idea how difficult it will be but I’ve filed a new bug for this RFE.
Very nice to hear but I have been unable to get success with it ! I downloaded version 3.0a1pre (2007081603) of Thunderbird, that I installed on my G5 running 10.4.10. I added at end of prefs.js the three lines (copy/paste) with Thunderbird closed !
Nothing happens in thunderbird, my adress book of thunderbird is still empty 🙁 An idea what’s wrong ?
It will not be included into any release of Thunderbird 2.0.0.x. You have to use one of the early releases of Thunderbird 3 to run a test.