Whom am I writing to?

September 18, 2019 6:27 AM

We're a small office with some people working from home, and we use Thunderbird for email. I'd like to setup a common address book to be shared and updated between the clients, and be able to include photos of the addressee in the contacts.

Q: Is there a plugin or native solution for this? I.e. setting up a CardDAV server and pulling the contacts from there?

Q2: If there's another email client which supports this natively we might consider switching, so suggestions welcome (we're on OSX, Win & Linux)

I've seen solutions of moving the contact files to Dropbox etc, but we're multiple concurrent users and that seems to create conflicts – and either way doesn't support photos nor groups.

I posted this to Stack Overflow a week ago but haven't seen any response, so any suggestions are welcome. A search through ask.mefi flags this question, but it's from 2008 so I figure there might have been progress since then…

posted by monocultured to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Assuming that you're just interested in having everyone be familiar with what their coworkers look like, as an alternative, do you use Slack? I work remotely and recognize everyone from their Slack photos. I also almost never use email internally anymore, but Slack instead, and we're all actually in much more contact now than we were a few years ago when we didn't use it. I also use Slack to look up email addresses when needed.
posted by pinochiette at 6:41 AM on September 18, 2019

If you’re happy to setup a suitable server, or are already using a server that supports cardDAV / vCard, the CardBook extension seems to do what you want.
posted by pharm at 6:45 AM on September 18, 2019 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I'll look into CardBook, thanks – seems to work with Nextcloud which we're already using a bit.

We're using Slack for some stuff, but it's like pulling teeth to get poeple in there, and we usually revert to email when communicating with association members.
posted by monocultured at 7:36 AM on September 18, 2019