Re: LDAP and e-mail

[Mark Wilcox <mewilcox@unt.edu>]

LDAP will solve the proprietary address book problem once all email clients can
talk LDAP. The technology is just so young, not everyone is on the same page yet.
Also the problems you may run into with Communicator and LDAP are probably related
to JAVA on your OS. The Address Book uses the Netscape JAVA LDAP SDK and not the C
SDK.
LDAP is more suitable for address-book than ACAP as far as I can tell. ACAP was
designed more for configuration files, which LDAP can also do nicely. :)

Mark

David E. Storey wrote:

> > does anyone here use LDAP to provide a way of searching e-mail addresses?
> >
> > Maybe someone here is coping with a similar problem or is using LDAP to
> > provide address books to mail clients, I would be very interested in
> > exchanging information (mainly asking some questions).
>
> I would *love* to be able to hold _personal_ address books in LDAP.  Pine can
> use LDAP to search, but not to manage. (at least, it's not obvious that you
> can) Netscape Communicator v4.5 has a new option to store roaming profiles on
> LDAP or HTTP servers.  I've managed to get HTTP to work, but not LDAP.  It
> keeps complaining about authentication problems. (It's the same LDAP server I
> successfully use with nss_ldap authentication) I've tried everything I know and
> I still can't get it to work.  Anyhoo, Communicator v4.5 allows you to store,
> among other things, your personal addressbook in LDAP.  Since I haven't gotten
> it to work, I don't know what format they store it in.  It would be way cool if
> this was standardized in some way so Pine, Netscape, Eudora, etc. could all
> access and maintain the same personal addressbook in a unified manner. (*THAT*
> would be cool!  Of course ACAP works for that too, but Eudora v4.0 is the only
> client I know that supports it.)
>
> On a server front, I noticed that qmail has a patch to work with LDAP for more
> than just address lookups.  (I'm about to try it out.)  It will supposedly
> store forwarding addresses, alternate addresses, mail quotas, delivery program
> paths, etc.  Looks groovy.  It has its own 'qmailUser' class and is marked as
> beta/pseudo-alpha. (http://www.nrg4u.com/)
>
> d

--
Mark Wilcox
mewilcox@unt.edu
University of North Texas  (940)565-2568
http://www.unt.edu/
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