How do Address Books work internally ?

[jack63ss]

I am looking for a tool to sync my address books on 3 different systems (and all Windows, I'll worry about Android later). I only care about the TB .mab files, not syncing with any other mail tool, as I have two Gmail, a Yahoo and an AOL account all going into Thunderbird. I was very surprised there was not any Add-Ons that did this, unless I wanted to store the contacts in the cloud (TBsync) or just keep rewriting the files (AddressBooks Synchonizer).

So what I am looking for is information about the internals of how the address books work so I can go try writing my own synchronizer. Even just something that outlined the file format would be helpful.

Now if it turns out others have tried and failed, okay I'll buy that, as it could actually be almost impossible (I do keep telling people "Nothing is Impossible, It's just a Computer" though). Or if someone knows of something I missed PLEASE let me know.

Thanks
Jack

Note: I actually installed AddressBooks Synchonizer on 2 of my systems, but there is no documentation and I could not make it work so I could see if it did what I wanted. I somewhat understand what it wants to do, but without some explanation of what specific data it wants and how to let it work around your permissions and anti-virus software, I didn't find it useful.

[DanRaisch]

It may be a rather daunting effort. This article may be informative -- https://wiki.mozilla.org/Address_Book

[tanstaafl]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Sharing_address_books has links to several add-ons that sync address books. Things are simplest if you have a email provider that supports the CardDAV protocol. Its a popular standard so email clients on your other systems might support it.