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Jay
Asked: 2010-11-19 05:58:50 +0800 CST

UbuntuOne contact syncing for Thunderbird with new phone plans?

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Syncing Thunderbird contacts with UbuntuOne previously relied on the Funambol sync client, which used UbuntuOne's beta phone sync feature to basically treat Thunderbird as a phone. With the introduction of paid syncing for phones, it doesn't seem like there is anyway to sync Thunderbird contacts with UbuntuOne without paying for a phone plan. Since that seems a little steep to just get that single piece of functionality, I was wondering if there are any other ways to sync Thunderbird contacts with UbuntuOne - either through couchDB or perhaps mirroring Thunderbird contacts to Evolution?

(There is a question on this general topic already: UbuntuOne contact synching for Thunderbird? , however, this is from before the plan and pricing restructuring was done and the answer provided is to use Funambol in UbuntuOne, so I thought it better to open a new question)

10.04 ubuntu-one thunderbird evolution contacts

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    A member of our web team is working on something on his free time (which is not much, because he is a member of our web team), https://launchpad.net/hedera. Quoting the description over there:

    Hedera is an extension for Thunderbird (currently Thunderbird 3 only, but Thunderbird 2 will be supported when the extension is stable) that synchronises contacts with DesktopCouch, thus allowing Evolution users to seamlessly switch to Thunderbird and retain their contacts, and Thunderbird users to benefit from the synchronisation with Ubuntu One and other computers they have paired with.

    It's still in the early phases of development - to quote Phil Newborough, "It may go crunch-bang!" so back up your contacts prior to use, or use a dedicated Thunderbird profile.

    As an aside, note that funambol-dependent contact sync (such as what currently gets your contacts onto your phones, and what can be used for Thunderbird 2 and Outlook integration) has always been exclusive to paid plans; there was a beta of the service during which we waived the costs, and I understand we didn't communicate effectively enough that this was a free beta of a paid service.

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