Re: LDAP and e-mail

[rweltman@netscape.com (Rob Weltman)]

Mark Wilcox wrote:

> 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.

  Actually, no. So far, Communicator itself doesn't use the java LDAP SDK at all, it just includes it for the benefit of third party programs. Communicator only uses the C SDK.

Rob


>
> 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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