--On Saturday, September 15, 2001 8:23 AM +1000 Jeremy Howard
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> In particular, Silkymail has support for IMSP preferences and adress
>> books, A very interesting feature if you want user being able to share
>> address books between Webmail and other mail clients.
>>
> What clients support IMSP? Is this support synchronization/off-line access
> (like good IMAP clients), or on-line access only, or import/export only?
>
> I'm looking to add something to our webmail site that synchronizes the
> Windows Address Book and other common mail client address books with our
> server address book. I can't find anything that supports this--the obvious
> choice would appear to be to use LDAP on the server, but I can't find any
> clients that support synchronization of LDAP with local address books.
Our products Mulberry and SilkyMail are pretty much the only shipping
clients that use IMSP. The old Simeon/ExecMail client used IMSP too, but
that is no longer being supported. The SilkyMail IMSP support is provided
as a PHP module. This is currently not available as part of the base PHP4
distribution, but you can grab it from the SilkyMail source distribution
which is free.
Mulberry does allow disconnected use of IMSP address books, in the same way
that it does IMAP mailboxes. However, IMSP does not have the same level of
protocol support as IMAP does to make disconnected operations as efficient
as they could be. In particular, there is no easy way to determine which
addresses have changed on the server, in order to minimise the number of
addresses to be synchronised. As a result a client has to download the
entire contents of an address book everytime it disconnects to ensure it
has an accurate cache of the address book contents. There are other issues
related to what address fields it stores and how groups are handled - these
would impact on how you synchronise withg some other address book format
In an ideal world, ACAP, the successor protocol to IMSP, would be
available, and that would deal with these types of issues. However, the
ACAP effort is all but dead, leaving IMSP as the only viable remote address
book and preferences protocol in use.
--
Cyrus Daboo
Cyrusoft International, Inc.
