iPhone contact list in Thunderbird

August 12, 2008

Did you know you can synchronise your iphone contacts with an iPhone. It is an undocumented feature of thunderbird that is a bit tricky to setup, but once you sort it out its beautiful!

  • In iTunes, go to the Info tab, and set your contacts to synchronise with the “Windows addressbook”
  • Customise thunderbird to use the windows addressbook as its contact list
    • Shutdown thunderbird
    • Locate a folder on your computer (use find) which contains a file called prefs.js, if there are two, use the one that is inside a parent folder with your windows username. (or see below)
    • In this folder, create a new file called user.js and put in it the following text: 
      user_pref("ldap_2.servers.OE.description", "Outlook Express");
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.OE.dirType", 3);
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.OE.uri", "moz-aboutlookdirectory://oe/");
    • Startup thunderbird and switch to your new addressbook, called “OE Contacts” in the addressbook window.

I can confirm that this works with Thunderbird 2 on Windows XP, but no luck with vista at this point.

File location on vista:
    D:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\36il4s0y.default\user.js
Posted by dongyage
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1 Comment »

One Response to “iPhone contact list in Thunderbird”

  1. Marcos said
    October 3, 2008 at 1:43 pm

    I think I know why this is not publically enabled in Thunderbird: Performance sucks, to the point where it’s unusable.

    Typing a few letters in the To: field makes Thunderbird hang for 5-10 seconds until it finds the autocomplete options.

    My gut tells me that since they never got it working *quite* right, they haven’t made the feature public.

    I have a little over 1000 contacts on MobileMe.

    What I did, and what I’m going to do for now, is to every now and then is to enable OE xontacts in Thunderbird, replace my Thunderbird Personal Address Book with the OE data, and then get rid of OE. Repeat every now and then. It’s a manual process and data only goes from MobileMe to Thunderbird (not the other way around) but it’s better than nothing.

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