Subject: global addressbooks via imapd ???

From: Ian Lumb <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1993 22:52:36 -0500

Greetings:-

We have recently had some interesting discussions re: global addressbooks
under pine. Perhaps an addition to our discussion, would be to allow
access to addressbooks via imapd. 

For example, suppose I decide that fred.yorku.ca will be the host that I
will use for storing my mail messages, and where I will keep my
.addressbook. If I am doing some work on barney.yorku.ca, it would be
really nice if the .addressbook on fred.yorku.ca could be consulted via
something analogous to imapd for my mail aliases. Currently, I update my
.addressbook on fred.yorku.ca, and manually (**gasp**) ftp a copy over to
my account on barney.yorku.ca. 

Ian.

--
Ian Lumb     Internet: <[email-masked]>
Earth & Atmospheric Science, York University
North York, Ontario  M3J 1P3,  CANADA
Voice: (416) 736-5245; Fax: (416) 736-5817

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1993 16:53:20 -0800 (PST)

Ian -

     Thank you for your suggestion.  The idea of distributing address book
information has been on the list of ideas for a long time.  You aren't the
only person who has been annoyed by having to FTP around copies of the address
book every time a trivial update is made!!

     It isn't necessarily desirable to do it in imapd, since you may want to
distribute address book information in non-IMAP environments as well.  Also,
you may have multiple IMAP servers in an organization which will give you all
the problems that having separate address books on clients would.

     In the draft IMSP (IMAP support protocol) definition I read, CMU suggests
that address books may be part of directory service.  This makes a lot of
sense to me.

     In any case, I think we will need to do something about distributing
address books.  I hope it's ``sooner'' rather than ``later''!  ;-)

-- Mark --