Contact Photos

This add-on displays the photo of the contact from whom the message was sent in the message header of Thunderbird 3 and Seamonkey 2. If a photo cannot be found for the sender then a Gravatar is used.

Please let me know if you have suggestions for this add-on because I just started it today.  One possible addition I may make is to replace the default photo with a Gravatar in the Address Book window and new/edit contact dialog as well.  I’d also like to center the image in the header.

Also see Bug 469517.

Download here.

File Type Selector

This isn’t technically new, but I recently added it to AMO.

This add-on allows you to customize the default format in which e-mail messages are saved when you manually choose to save one or more messages.  It works in Thunderbird 2 and 3 as well as Seamonkey 2.  The default in Thunderbird is hardcoded as .eml and cannot be changed when saving multiple messages as far as I can tell.

Download here.

gContactSync Updates

Version 0.3

I plan on releasing 0.3.0a1 before I go back to school on January 11th.

Pre-alpha (early testing) download information

Here’s a basic summary of its features.  This wiki article has more details.

• Can synchronize your Google Contacts (Gmail, Google Apps, etc.) with Mozilla Thunderbird.
• Supports multiple Google Accounts and Address Books
• Groups in Google can be synchronized with individual Address Books or mailing lists in one AB
• Each Address Book can be synchronized with one of the following:
  • All contacts and all groups with mailing lists
  • One specific group
  • All contacts
• Every synchronized AB can have its own custom settings
• You can choose to complete synchronize your contacts (so Thunderbird matches Google), to only read changes from Google but never apply TB’s changes, or to only write to Google and never apply changes made remotely.
• Contact photos are downloaded and displayed in Thunderbird 3 & Seamonkey 2.

Version 0.2

Here’s a brief changelist since the last post.  Download here.

Version 0.2.9

• Fixes some bugs with read-only mode
• Compatible with Seamonkey 2.0

Version 0.2.10

• Fixes a bug encountered when manually deleting a contact from Thunderbird

Version 0.2.11

• Fake/dummy e-mail addresses are now only added to new contacts when necessary (only when the contact is in one or more mailing lists). Reset and sync again to remove the unnecessary addresses, or just edit the contact.
• Adds a Korean (ko-KR) locale – thanks to Han, Dong-yoo
• Updated Spanish (es-ES) locale – thanks to RigoNet
• Improved name parsing for Asian names (thanks to Han, Dong-yoo)

Download here.

The best way to stay up-to-date on new versions is probably through Twitter: gcontactsync

Supported Applications

• Thunderbird 2
• Thunderbird 3 (all versions, including beta 4 and 3.0pre)
• Thunderbird 3.1a1pre
• Seamonkey 2 (all versions, including beta 2 and 2.0pre)

Version 0.2.8

• Fixes ‘broken’ usernames that were able to get an authentication token but failed when trying to get contacts or groups. (usernames only without a domain or with spaces at the beginning or end)
• Fixed the install.rdf file for Seamonkey

Version 0.2.7

• Bug fix for renewing expired authentication tokens

Version 0.2.6

• Updated the Portuguese translation
• Mailing Lists (groups) in Thunderbird now use their translated names
• The log moved to the main profile directory

Version 0.2.5

• Adds the following new languages:
  • Portuguese (devezas on BabelZilla)
  • Russian (Glk63)
  • Spanish (with help from Guillermo Klew from VisualBeta.es)

Version 0.2.4

• Fixed a bug with adding or renaming groups
• Minor updates to the Italian translation (thanks ZaZy)

Version 0.3 Update

This deserves its own blog post, but here is a basic summary.  I don’t have a tentative release date yet since this is just a hobby, not a job.

The main delay is described here. College (a full 18 credits) and my job (programming) don’t exactly leave me with much free time, either.

Features

• Support for Google’s new API
• Support for downloading contact photos*
• Synchronized birthday field**
• ‘Relation’ fields (Mother, Father, Coworker, etc.
• More phone number types

Potential Features

• The individual address fields may be synchronized instead of using the new address fields
• Support for adding, updating, and removing contact photos

*I (among others) worked on contact photos for the Address Book in Thunderbird 3 beta 4/Seamonkey 2.0 Beta 2.  gContactSync 0.3 and up will download photos in all supported applications, but you’ll have to use TB 3 or SM 2 to see them.
**I worked on a birthday field for the address book in Thunderbird 3/Seamonkey 2.  If you use TB 2 the values are synchronized but not displayed.  Google also added a birthday field after the changes were made in Thunderbird.

Google announced a new version, 0.3, of their contacts data API yesterday. It adds a significant amount of flexibility, several new fields, and enhances existing fields. Some of the major changes include:

• Structured Postal Addresses – It is now possible to keep the structured address fields that Thunderbird has without converting them.
• A birthday field – I am currently working on enhancing the birthday field that will be present in Thunderbird 3, so the birthday values will be synchronized by default. If you use Thunderbird 2 the values will still be stored and displayed once you upgraded to 3.
• Website fields with various types (list)
• More phone number types
• A nickname field

It doesn’t look like all of the changes are available in Gmail yet, but you can see a few of them here.

Version 0.3

I am going to start working on Version 0.3 sometime this week which will use the new API and hopefully include some of the most frequently requested enhancements. For those of you familiar with Bugzilla, I have a bug tracking my changes. I am going to focus heavily on Thunderbird 3 starting with version 0.3 and may drop support for 2 with future versions. If you are opposed to this please let me know and I will reconsider.

Here are some potential features. Please keep in mind that I have a full time internship that involves programming and am starting an online class soon, so I may have to delay some of these. The links are to bugs where I will track my progress.

• Code refactoring. This isn’t the most popular feature request, but I would like to like to reorganize the existing code with the new API and these enhancements in mind.
• Contact photos. I am working on contact photos in Thunderbird 3 and have a modified version of gContactSync 0.2.4 that will download photos from Google when adding contacts for the first time. Due to time constraints, 0.3 may be limited to downloading photos only in TB 3.
• Synchronizing all fields that only Thunderbird has and allow for customization of that data.
• Adding a new ‘Relation’ field. This describes the relationship between you and the contact (brother, sister, mother, father, child, coworker, etc.). I haven’t found an existing request for Thunderbird in Bugzilla, so maybe I could add it in Thunderbird rather than just gContactSync.
• Several more types of phone numbers. (list)
• Website field types, and possibly more fields.
• More advanced synchronization with a more intuitive wizard (pick an account, then all groups w/ mailing lists, one group, or no groups/all contacts, plus a few options). Syncing individual groups with address books instead of mailing lists would prevent nearly all error reports that I get.
• A button or context menu to synchronize only one directory.

Version 0.2

There have been a few new versions of gContactSync 0.2. It is currently up to version 0.2.3 that handles mailing list bugs a bit more gracefully. Download.

Since the development of 0.3 is going to take some time, I am going to slow down development of 0.2 and let it get translated to more languages.

Locales

• ZaZy was kind enough to translate gContactSync to Italian (it). Updates to the locale will be in 0.2.4
• A Russian (ru-RU) translation is being worked on courtesy of Glk63 on BabelZilla.
• A French (fr-FR) translation is in progress by afroxav. Another translation was done by LaGrange.

Lessons Learned

1. Mailing lists are evil. Just kidding, but they can be broken easily rending them (and their parent address book) useless. The cause of nearly every error report I have received so far is directly related to mailing lists.
2. The nobody<id>@nowhere.invalid workaround helps but it is still possible to break mailing lists with this workaround.
3. People would like to see gContactSync in their native language.
4. People have good ideas and valuable suggestions. I have received a lot of feedback and requests. While I don’t have the time to implement every suggestion, I can at least try to add the more popular suggestions
5. Creating a forum was a good idea.

Helping with Development

If you know a bit about JavaScript, XML, XUL, and/or CSS or even if you would like to learn I wouldn’t mind letting others fix bugs or enhance gContactSync. The code has a decent amount of comments and I generated some JsDoc of 0.2.

Or if you are good with icons and could make at least a sync button image I’m sure everyone would appreciate it.

You can find the download on addons.mozilla.org (recommended) or mozdev.org.

Current Features

• All the features of 0.1
  • Synchronizes an address book in Thunderbird with contacts from a Google Account (Gmail)
  • Customizable
  • Groups in Gmail are synchronized with mailing lists in Thunderbird
• Duplicates (multiple contacts with the same e-mail address) are allowed
• Much faster synchronization than 0.1
• Only US English (en-US) for now, but more translations coming soon
• Customization of how addresses are synchronized
• Can synchronize just one group (My Contacts), all groups (including My Contacts, Family, Friends, & Coworkers), or all contacts and no groups
• A new fetch-only mode where Thunderbird only receives updates and never sends updates to or deletes contacts from Google.

Changes since 0.2.0

• Added some workarounds for mailing list bugs in Thunderbird (easily the number 1 cause of problems with gContactSync)
• Added a FAQs page on the wiki and a link in the gContactSync menu
• Improved logging (to help me with troubleshooting)
• Fixed the Advanced tab of the Preferences dialog
• Improved the first/last name parsing for contacts from Gmail

Where to look for help

You can use the following resources for help or suggestions for gContactSync:

• A flash demo and introduction
• The wiki
• The forum
• The error reporting form

JSDoc

I am working on improving the documentation for any interested developers.  You can find it here, and it will probably change and improve in the near future.  If you are interested in helping please let me know.  It is open source, so you are free to use it as long as you follow the license.

Current Features

• All the features of 0.1
  • Synchronizes an address book in Thunderbird with contacts from a Google Account (Gmail)
  • Customizable
  • Groups in Gmail are synchronized with mailing lists in Thunderbird
• Duplicates (multiple contacts with the same e-mail address) are allowed
• Much faster synchronization than 0.1
• Only US English (en-US) until I finish adding features and strings
• Customization of how addresses are synchronized
• Default groups are enabled (Family, Friends, Coworkers) as mailing lists in Thunderbird
• A new fetch-only mode where Thunderbird only receives updates and never sends updates to or deletes contacts from Google.

What Features are left for 0.2.0?

0.2.0 will probably have an option to just synchronize the My Contacts group since it contains the most important contacts and is all some devices, like the iPhone/iPod touch, synchronize.  It will also help avoid the usual problems with mailing lists.  I may also make some UI changes before 0.2.0.

Bugfixes & Enhancements since 0.1.x

Bugs in italics are new since 0.2.0b2r1

• Bug 20779 Add a preference to disable auto-delete
  
• Bug 20853 Too much recursion when the log directory is deleted
  
• Bug 20852 Illegal rel value due to dummy e-mail address
• Bug 20658 Add version info to the log
• Bug 20739 Add links to the support forum & wiki in the menu
• Bug 20757 Allow read/fetch of Google Contacts only
• Bug 20546 – Search is broken in gContactSync 0.2
• Bug 20644 – Localize all strings in options.xul
• Bug 20656 – Error: gAddressBookBundle is undefined
• Bug 20527 – Avoid HTTP Request errors when the Address Book window is closed
• Bug 20509 – Add Seamonkey support
• Bug 20508 – Consider adding overlay.css to customizeToolbar.xul
• Bug 20487 – Add shortcut to preferences in the Address Book
• Bug 20486 – Improve Address Preferences
• Bug 20352 – Update gContactSync to use Contacts Data API 2
• Bug 20148 – Default groups dont appear in Thunderbird
• Bug 19786 – Support for Google’s ‘Most Contacted’ & ‘Suggested Contacts’

Sync Button Details

Newest instructions.

Quite a few users have reporting seeing a strange and ugly icon for the Sync button:

It should look like this for now:

If you still see the incorrect icons there is a workaround that should fix it:

1. In the Address Book window, go to gContactSync -> Preferences
2. Check Force the Sync toolbar button image.
3. Click OK/Close
4. Close the Address Book window and open it again.

If those instructions still do not work, please let me know.

Feedback

I would love to hear your feedback, whether positive or negative (if polite ).  My new preferred method of feedback is through the forum, which will hopefully help me stop forgetting to reply to e-mail and let others add their opinions to feedback.  Please send logs with the error report form or via e-mail and do not put them on the forum.

I am working on updating the wiki with articles on how to use and troubleshoot gContactSync.

I will be adding some polls here and would appreciate any feedback.

Tutorials for 0.2.0

I will probably create some flash tutorials like the original one I had.  This time I will probably host them on YouTube to prevent my website from getting blasted again.

As the author of a synchronization extension for Thunderbird 2 and 3, I get a lot of questions about duplicate contacts.  Duplicates are more common than ever  with the explosive popularity of mobile devices.

There is a fairly popular Duplicate Contact Manager Extension on AMO, but it hasn’t been updated recently, won’t work in Thunderbird 3, and comments mention some bugs, possibly including one that was present in gContactSync 0.2.0a1.

I have not found a way to contact the author, Marian Steinbach, to offer my assistance with updating it for Thunderbird 3.  It looks like the Google Group doesn’t have much activity.

I can reuse a good chunk of code from gContactSync which would allow it to work in Thunderbird 2 or 3, but I would most likely package it as a new extension to not force everyone to install gContactSync just to remove duplicate contacts.  I had some primitive duplicate detection code in 0.1.x, but it was inefficient and only checked e-mail addresses since that’s what Google used to identify duplicates.

So, I have three questions.

1. Would there be enough interest to warrant new duplicate contacts extension?
2. Would anyone else like to work with me to develop one?  I already have plenty of code for working with contacts and the address book; it would just need an intuitive, customizable front-end and an efficient way to find duplicates.  I’m just a bit busy with work, gContactSync, online classes, and a possibly emerging social life.
3. Does anyone have a way of contacting the original developer?

I have decided to make a new website where I can combine my blog, old websites (pirules.com and pirules.net), some content from my mozdev projects.  This may come as a shock after reading my previous domain names, but my new domain is pirules.org.

It will probably contain the content from my old websites, including computer tutorials and tweaks, the programs I wrote in high school, extension info, etc.; my new blog; support forums for my extensions; and a wiki.

It is hosted by HostGator since I’m always on the move (home, internship, college) and my ISPs would probably not like me if I hosted everthing.  To my surprise, I was able to setup my account and get a jailshell today (Pi day/Saturday) and they were very quick.  Ironically, I used to setup and support cPanel users.

My old host, 1&1 was good for the price, but I wanted access to more and larger databases, PHP 5, SSH, etc.

New links

I would appreciate it if everyone would change all links to point to the my new website soon.  I have not nearly finished bringing everything up to date yet.

• Blog
• Forum (intended for extension support)
• Wiki (also intended for extension support)
• Main Site (warning – many links are broken; I’m still working on it).  It links to pirules.com in several places.
• gContactSync extension information
• openCRX extension information
• I will continue to use Mozdev for the CVS repositories, Bugzilla, downloads, and basic information since it and the people who run it are awesome.

I have imported all of my blog posts to my new blog, and will probably write new posts in both locations until this one stops getting so many hits.  I have not decided what to do with my old websites since they are both getting a steady flow of hits.  pirules.com is hosted for free and remains to be the site with the most hits if you exclude my blog.

openCRX

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was asked to write an extension that would import contacts from and export contacts to openCRX.  It is an open source (BSD-style license) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution with a lot of Groupware features

It shares a lot of code with gContactSync with a few less Address Book modifications, although I have not merged some recent v0.2 changes in yet.  It is fully compatible with gContactSync, but does not require it.

Links

• Download (still under initial development/testing and works best in Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 2 or higher)
• Extension Description
• Extension Information
• Mozdev project
• openCRX homepage
• openCRX features

Pi Day

Today is ‘Pi Day’ in the US (March 14th is represented as 3/14 in our stange date format).  I noticed mozdev.org has “3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510…” in their header, which is correct if you don’t want to round the last 0 to a 1 (the next digit is 5).  I decided not to memorize 64 more digits (to bring me from 250 to 314) at the moment but there is always next year.

Edit: Almost forgot to mention that the House of Representatives ’supports’ the designation of March 14th as Pi Day.

It only affects Thunderbird 2 (not any recent version of Thunderbird 3 or Seamonkey), but 0.2.0b1 has more changes so I recommend it to all users.

Download link:

https://www.mozdev.org/projects/overview/gcontactsync/

Symptoms:

• The search filter cannot be removed until Thunderbird is restarted
• Contacts cannot be modified, added, or removed to or from that directory until Thunderbird is restarted
• Unable to synchronize (some errors listed below).
• The status bar says “Synchronizing…” and will not change
• Mailing lists and contacts in that directory may not work properly, even after a restart

Some Errors:

***WARNING: Couldn’t evaluate command
Error – no URL was found for the HTTP Request

For technical details and more possible error messages please see the bug report.

Fix:

1. Download the extension from the link and install in Thunderbird
2. Restart Thunderbird
3. Open the address book
4. If synchronization completes successfully you are finished, otherwise continue.

It is possible, although unlikely that you may need to do more.  I had to do this with my test profile that I corrupted when attempting to find the cause of the bug but not the others.  If you must follow these steps please e-mail me so I know.

1. Repeat this for all synchronized address books:
   1. Go to Gmail and backup your contacts (Export link in the top right of the contacts page)
   2. Select the synchronized address book in Thunderbird
   3. Go to Tools -> Export, and make sure you choose LDIF, then save it.  This will backup your contacts in case anything happens.
   4. Right-click the directory and click “Delete” and click OK at the prompt.  This will not delete your contacts from Google.
2. Close the address book window and all Thunderbird windows
3. Start Thunderbird again, but do not open the Address Book window yet
4. Open the Add-ons manager (Tools -> Options -> Add-ons), select gContactSync and click Options or Preferences.
5. Go to the Accounts tab
6. You should see your e-mail addresses and blank spaces where the address books should be.  If not, backup and delete the named address books and go to step 6 (e-mail me for assistance or if you cannot remove them)
7. Select the address and click ‘Change Address Book’, then type a name and click OK.  Repeat for all accounts.
8. Close the Preferences dialog and add-ons manager
9. Open the Address Book window and Sync if it doesn’t start automatically.  There should not be any errors, and you should see your contacts in each synchronized address book.

I can make more thorough instructions with screenshots if necessary tomorrow evening (US central time).  Please let me know if you would like this.

If you have any questions or this doesn’t work please don’t hesitate to e-mail me.

Download link:

https://www.mozdev.org/projects/overview/gcontactsync/

The Sync button is still not working for all users, and I finally managed to get it on one profile in Windows Vista.  When I upgraded to 0.2.0b1 it went back to the normal icon, but this release does not have a fix.  You may avoid using the Sync button and use the Sync option under the gContactSync menu in the Address Book toolbar instead.
If you want to remove the button:

1. Go to gContactSync -> Preferences -> Main
2. Uncheck “Enable the Sync toolbar button”
3. Click OK or Close, then close and reopen the Address Book.
4. If the button doesn’t disappear please let me know.

Bugfixes/enhancements since 0.1.x

Bugs in italics are new since 0.2.0a2

• Bug 20546 – Search is broken in gContactSync 0.2
• Bug 20644 – Localize all strings in options.xul
• Bug 20656 – Error: gAddressBookBundle is undefined
• Bug 20527 – Avoid HTTP Request errors when the Address Book window is closed
• Bug 20509 – Add Seamonkey support
  
• Bug 20508 – Consider adding overlay.css to customizeToolbar.xul
• Bug 20487 – Add shortcut to preferences in the Address Book
• Bug 20486 – Improve Address Preferences
• Bug 20352 – Update gContactSync to use Contacts Data API 2
• Bug 20148 – Default groups dont appear in Thunderbird
• Bug 19786 – Support for Google’s ‘Most Contacted’ & ‘Suggested Contacts’

Known Bugs

• The Sync toolbar button still doesn’t always work

I apologize for the inconvenience

Josh