Is it possible to store user contact/ address book in imap server?

[David H. Lynch Jr.]

I like Evolution, but as best as I can tell:

	With there MAPI connector (which I do not have) you can access
contacts,...

	But with straight evolution you can not access contacts, tasks,
etc created by outlook users. You can create evolution contacts, etc.
Which I believe are in a standards compliant format. But you still can
not access those create by outlook.

	Finally, evolution only runs under Linux and like it or not for
the moment I need W32 IMAP clients.

	Ultimately, Outlook is evil. But there does not exist a W32
client that duplicates its functionality. There are kludges, but I am
not looking to replace one mess with another.

	The best I have seen thus far is evolution - BUT evolution is
Linux only, and like it or not I can't go there yet, and evolution does
not understand existing Outlook contacts etc. when stored on an IMAP
server, so I can not even just use it myself.



-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Marsden [mailto:jonathan at bach.xc.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 1:42 PM
To: dhlii at 1dla.com
Cc: info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
Subject: RE: Is it possible to store user contact/ address book in imap
server?


On 15 Jul 2003, David H. Lynch, Jr. writes:

> 	There is nothing special about contact/address book information.

> There is no reason you can not store contacts, tasks, calendar items, 
> ... In any IMAP server you choose. All they are is specially formatted

> messages.

> 	The Problem is that there are no IMAP clients that can properly 
> understand and treat those messages as contacts, tasks, ...

No IMAP clients?  Ximian Evolution might qualify as one? :-)

For most enterprises, MS Outlook is the de facto expected and desired
client, like it or loathe it, for this sort of "email plus calendaring
plus contacts" setup.  The (commercial) Bynari Insight Connector addin
for Outlook handles this.  It is IMO far from perfect as an overall
email/ calendaring/ contacts solution, and has had some significant
stability issues on the client in the past.  But if you really need this
functionality, it does get the job done.  While officially Bynari will
only support it when used with their "Insight Server", Insight Server is
really a package of Postfix + Cyrus + Apache + ProFTPd and a pretty
web-based management interface, so it can be used against Cyrus if you
are willing to experiment a little.

Jonathan
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