{"id":2154,"date":"2011-08-08T13:34:26","date_gmt":"2011-08-08T18:34:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/?p=2154"},"modified":"2023-12-20T16:25:13","modified_gmt":"2023-12-20T21:25:13","slug":"eds-contacts-integration-for-thunderbird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/2011\/08\/08\/eds-contacts-integration-for-thunderbird\/","title":{"rendered":"EDS Contacts Integration for Thunderbird – So What?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of you might be wondering what the advantage is of having Thunderbird share address books with Evolution<\/a>.\u00a0 I mean, what’s the point?\u00a0 A user will most likely use Thunderbird or <\/em>Evolution – but rarely both.\u00a0 Why is sharing contacts between the two interesting at all?<\/p>\n

So, the answer lies in how Evolution stores contacts.\u00a0 If you’re running Evolution, you’re actually running two pieces of software – the Evolution client, and the Evolution Data Server (EDS)<\/a>.\u00a0 The client is what most users think of as Evolution – it’s the program with the GUI that allows users to access and manipulate their mail, contacts, calendar, etc.<\/p>\n

But the heavy lifting is really being done by the Evolution Data Server.\u00a0 The EDS is the program communicating with the e-mail servers to get and store your mail.\u00a0 It’s the program communicating with your various address books (local or remote, like Google Contacts).\u00a0 It’s the program that’s communicating with all of your calendars and task lists.<\/p>\n

Essentially, if your Evolution experience was a restaurant, then the Evolution Data Server is the kitchen.\u00a0 The Evolution client is just your waiter.\u00a0 The waiter takes your orders and passes them off to the kitchen, the kitchen does all of the cooking, and then the waiter brings you the tasty results.<\/p>\n

The fact that GNOME has split Evolution like this is really handy.\u00a0 It means that alternative clients can access Evolution’s mail, contacts and calendars.\u00a0 Essentially, the user could uninstall the Evolution client, but keep EDS installed, and still have access to all of their mail, contacts and calendars.<\/p>\n

To stretch the restaurant analogy a little bit, what I’m saying is that the GNOME developers made it possible for you to order take out from the Evolution restaurant via a third-party.<\/p>\n

So what’s the advantage of that?<\/p>\n

Well, for one thing, Evolution Data Server talks to some services that Thunderbird doesn’t – for example, Google Contacts (although, this extension suggests that Google Contacts integration for Thunderbird is possible without EDS<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The other big one is Ubuntu One contacts sync<\/a>.\u00a0 Ubuntu One contacts are stored in CouchDB address books that are accessed through EDS.\u00a0 Now that Thunderbird can read your EDS address books, it means that you get your Ubuntu One contacts as well (at least, it will be able to, once Ubuntu One contacts sync starts working in Oneiric).<\/p>\n

Not bad, eh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of you might be wondering what the advantage is of having Thunderbird share address books with Evolution.\u00a0 I mean, what’s the point?\u00a0 A user will most likely use Thunderbird or Evolution – but rarely both.\u00a0 Why is sharing contacts between the two interesting at all? So, the answer lies in how Evolution stores contacts.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[861,79,862],"tags":[934,935,947,954,955,949,705,931],"class_list":["post-2154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mozilla-2","category-technology","category-thunderbird","tag-address-book","tag-contacts","tag-eds","tag-evolution","tag-gnome","tag-oneiric","tag-ubuntu","tag-ubuntu-one"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prmTy-yK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2154"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3118,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154\/revisions\/3118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}