On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 23:25 -0500, Ric Moore wrote: > On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 10:40 -0700, Craig White wrote: > > On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 11:15 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote: > > > Craig White wrote: > > > > > > > His confusion is very common...I admit that I too was confused by that > > > > very notion when I first started mucking with LDAP. One would think that > > > > if you use say OpenOffice to save say Test.DOC that Microsoft Word > > > > should be able to open that file [1]. Likewise, since LDIF is the world > > > > of LDAP, shouldn't one expect that an LDIF file exported by Kontact be > > > > usable with openldap? > > > > > > Is there some reason that there isn't a standard schema shipped with the > > > server that supplies what the clients in the distribution expect? > > ---- > > If I understand your term 'clients' to mean an address book client like > > Kontact, I would venture to guess that Kontact like Evolution and all > > other address book clients each has their own schema. If you are > > decrying that all of the various address book clients all have differing > > notions about schema's, then you should take that up with them. > > > > Most, if not all LDAP implementations include an inetOrgPerson schema > > that is consistent because this is part of an RFC. Each of the address > > book clients that I have looked at, use attributes that go beyond the > > inetOrgPerson schema and that is what is really being discussed. > > > > Now if you are referring to something other than address book 'clients', > > then you will have to be more specific. > > My own pre-conceived notion was this. I use Kaddressbook for our 1,500 > contacts. I use Evolution for my pop-email account with gmail and am > interested in getting everything talking to each other and my Windows > using boss. I send him the addressbook.csv master file, then he tells me > that he's added shit to it, and it all goes to hell. I have not been > able to just import his edited copy without a ton of duplicates. > > So, hosting an ldap server, in my mind, would allow him to just add to > the addressbook hosted here. Am I far off base in my expectations?? NOW > he wants a comma delimited file of just the email addresses, so he can > hit return and send one massive email spew to everyone on the list. > > Back when I had a list like that and in /etc/aliases I could just note > the group to the file name and sendmail pounded out the emails. We're > talking about 8 years ago. Guess how much I remember? <grins> > > So, all personal data in kaddressbook, I might handle the group emails > from Evolution or not, or crank up sendmail or procmail to handle the > mass mailings if I can coax out the email addresses, OR learn something > new that I don't know. I took some time off away from Linux and the gap > in what I knew then and what is there now is pretty significant. Thanks > for your patience. Ric ---- MOST e-mail address book 'clients' are actually read-only clients and don't make any attempt to have write access. Evolution is capable of writing to LDAP address books and I believe that Kontact (KaddressBook) can now also 'write' to LDAP address books. That said, if you try to use either program, beyond the most basic attributes, each of the various programs you mentioned (evolution, kaddressbook, and whatever boss uses) would have different concepts of extended attributes beyond the basic inetOrgPerson and thus, would offer their own schema which makes supporting more than one specific address book client extremely difficult. here is a schema for Mozilla (Thunderbird/SeaMonkey) http://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Mozilla_LDAP_Address_Book_Schema googling for kaddressbook schema turned up a bunch of empty holes but I am not going to spend much time on it...perhaps the Kolab schema is appropriate, I just don't know but perhaps Rex has an idea. This is an exhaustive, complicated but interesting concept on how to handle Outlook and Thunderbird users... http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialLDAP-GILSchemaExtension.html Evolution has it's own schema and I think Tim can tell you how to find it. I typically install horde/imp/kronolith/ingo/turba which is a web based mail/mail filtering/shared calendars/shared address books solution and it actually is a very cool LDAP client which not only provides reasonable web based LDAP addressbook editing, it also imports CSV into LDAP, thereby saving you from the pain of converting from a csv file into an ldif. Of course this adds a whole new layer of complexity to the solution but it has a big payoff at the end because you get a workgroup collaboration software system (shared tasks, shared calendars, shared address books and even shared mail if you have a system like cyrus which has an ACL methodology to share mailboxes). That said, it's highly doubtful that you can use any mail program that you are thinking of to send more than an e-mail to more than 50 people because that typically isn't permitted. If the intent is to do e-mail blasting/bulk e-mailing, it's only reasonable to use a program designed for that purpose because not only will it queue e-mails one at a time, it should also be able to encode the recipient in a manner that can automate handling of e-mail rejections, opt-out (consider the Can-SPAM act or whatever it's called) and have contact management built-in. Generally, you would want some methodology to automatically handle bounces, redeliveries, etc. This is a lot more complicated than you think it is. Craig
