Thunderbird sync add-on

That already exists. Go to http://www.plaxo.com/downloads/thunde...

I'm currently using Google Contact sync addon for thunderbird to sync my contacts between thunderbird and gmail. The link is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thun...

Hope that helps.

Thanks! That might hold me until Soocial gets theirs running.

There is another add-on called Zindus that I have used for the last year or so. It too works quite well.

Regarding Plaxo

Plaxo is, in my view, not intended for syncing. Plaxo will mess up your gmail database. Plaxo likes to put all contact information in notes and put in their unique id for each of your contacts. Plaxo is good for keeping the contacts current but it does not behave well for Gmail.

My experience with Plaxo is about 1 year old so they have learned how to interact better with gmail since the release of gmail contacts api.

Thanks for the posts maybe one of these will work for me. I am still hope that Soocial makes one for the T-Bird because sync seems to work the best if a given device is only 1 step away from the sync hub. As soon as you get 2 steps away more errors and incompatibility issues pop up. Soocial caught my eye because they hope to support T-Bird and Blackberry's, both of which I use in addition to my core MS Outlook.

Why is this topic marked as if the company has already implemented the idea when they haven't done so yet? Either way, I also hope they'll add this option soon.

Hi, are there any news regarding the thunderbird add-on?

any news?

Perhaps I just don't understand how Funambol works, but as I see it, the problem with Funambol is that one has to have access to a Funambol server, which means you have to have the means to setup your own server or you have to buy space on one. I though Soocial was trying to be the one-stop solution for syncing contacts. Requiring users to go through a third party application seems like a cop-out.

I feel stupid. I had just figured that out before you replied and was framing my "duh!" response. The one part I couldn't quite figure out was the server name (that it was sync.soocial... ), but you beat me to it. Thanks!

Tried it out - doesn't work. See attached image (my internet-connection is okay...).

Well, my first attempt timed out after maybe half an hour and only 250 of ~400 contacts having synced (I'm trying to load all of my Soocial contacts into Thunderbird). I killed the connection and am trying a fresh sync again. Seems to be moving a lot faster this time.

One thing that jumped out at me of those that did sync is that email addresses did NOT show up in Thunderbird if they were marked as Work. Home and Other seem to make it, although the vast majority of these ended up in the "Additional Email" field of Thunderbird rather than the "Email" field (even if there was only a single email address for the contact).

There does not appear to be overwhelming consistency. Two contacts, both with a single email address marked Home, one shows up in the Email field, the other in the "Additional Email" field. The one thing I notice, however, is that within the Soocial web client, when just viewing the contact, the one whose email address shows up in Thunderbird's "Email" field does not have a label next to the email address. If you go into the edit screen for that contact, the email is marked as home, but this isn't showing up in view mode. The other contact does show "home" in the view mode, and in this case the email is getting put into the "Additional Email" field in Thunderbird.

In one case where a contact has two home email addresses, one marked as preferred within Soocial, the only one that showed up (in the additional field) was the one that is NOT marked as preferred. Not sure if Preferred is meant to prioritize syncing or not, but thought I'd mention it.

Some other issues. Some fields are occasionally truncated for no obvious reason, e.g., the zipcode for one contact is listed as "2770=" Why the last digit was replaced by an = is not clear. For most of the other ones I've scanned through, they appear fine, although I've seen other address fields which are similarly truncated. No obvious pattern at this point.

By the time I finished writing this the second sync had worked successfully. Well, successfully in that all Work emails were completely left out even if they were the only email address for that individual. Still looks like it needs some work.

Works like a champ.

The funambol add-on does not work for Thunderbird 3 (yet). Assuming I'm not syncing with Google contacts, is there another way to sync with Thunderbird?

You can get a beta v1 of the funambol add-on for Windows that supports TB3 here: https://mozilla-plugin.forge.funambol...

Tested it out and functionally it works, but as with anything involving syncml I find the results to be half-baked. Missing a lot of fields, including email addresses unless they are marked as the "Home" (not "Work" or anything else) address.

Need something with more finesse (which is why I'm using Soocial to manage my iPhone contacts in the first place!)

Thanks for the feedback.

E.

It sounds pretty much like the problems I reported with the TB2 client about two weeks ago (see above). E-mails marked as "Work" (on Soocial) do not Sync. E-mails marked as "Other" show up in TB as "E-mail". Emails marked as "Home" show up as "Additional E-mail". I also had some truncated fields, but there was no rhyme or reason that I could determine as to why.

I haven't installed TB3 yet on my primary computer because I'm waiting for a few more plugins to catch up, but I can re-test the behavior of the client with TB2 whenever necessary.

I have just switched from Plaxo/Nuevasync to Soocial today for a testdrive and hopefully permanently (Plaxo has discontinued the support for TB3 and is not allowing nuevasync to access their API)

I have approx 800 contacts. When I tried to sync TB2 with fonambul and the iphone (via your app) I noticed the same problem that Michael Rosenberg and stephan.sann wrote about.

Thunderbird 2 and Funambol The system starts fine, but then stops due to a network connection error.
10:36:34 GMT [DEBUG] Synchronization URL: http://sync.soocial.com
10:36:34 GMT [INFO] Preparing synchronization of contact...
10:36:36 GMT [INFO] [contact] Initializing all contacts...
10:36:37 GMT [INFO] [contact] Initialization done
10:36:37 GMT [INFO] [contact] Detected 798 items
10:41:36 GMT [ERROR] Server Failure: server returned error code 407
10:41:36 GMT [ERROR] Error in syncing: Server Failure: server returned error code 407

A possibly similar thing happened when trying to do the same thing from the iPhone. (no logs there unfortunately) After a random time amount, during the process a unspecific "Network Error" appears and the sync is logged as not completed. After restarting the sync process a couple of times, it finally "made it through"

Could this be the same bug?

I'm a little confused. I'm trying to share contacts across Thunderbird, Gmail and Blackberry, and share them with my assistant (i.e. to her Thunderbird and Gmail accounts too). I'm currently using a combo of Zindus and Google Sync, which sort of works but isn't shareable, and is horrible to edit, so my contact list is full of duplicates and partials. We have several hundred offline addresses in my lovely dusty old copy of Lotus Organizer which I'm not happy to bring in until everything connects. Soocial looks great for the Gmail to Blackberry piece, and to allow us to share between Gmail accounts.

What do you recommend I do to bring Thunderbird into the loop? Stick with Zindus and install it on Sarah's PC too? Go to Funambol using the mechanism you describe here? Or wait (how long?) until you have something that does the job in one step?

In case it makes any difference, our mail server is on my network server in Exchange, but we always access it through Thunderbird and we're allergic to Outlook.

It would be really useful to have a recommendation from you.

Hey I am trying funambol, but it doesn't work for TB3. Could you help us writing to funambol so they may able to update the system?

Thanks

Even if you have Windows, the funambol beta plugin for TB 3.0 is extremely buggy. It crashed TB every time I tried to send an email (and from looking at the forums, I'm not the only one who experienced this problem)

Finally got this working using the Funambol plugin version 1.0b3. I still think Soocial needs a Thunderbird plugin but as long as the Funambol plugin doesn't crash things again, it's not that important to me.

One issue I have noticed though, is that my GMail contact groups get synced to Soocial, but they don't make it over to Thunderbird. Is there a way to make these groups sync to Thunderbird?

I whish that Soocial developers would contribute and help improving the Funambol Thunderbird addon.