Synchronize Droid and Thunderbird Contacts



I've had an Android phone for quite some time now. I do not want to give *anyone* my personal contacts. However, I want to synchronize my contacts across devices. So I used the *MyPhoneExplorer* to manually sync my contacts between the phone and all my three clients. Since this is a pain in the ass, I was looking for an alternate solution. If you want to do what I did, do this: * Setup your own server with an [ownCloud](http://www.owncloud.org) install. * Backup your existing adress books to any format you like (*.ldif, *.csv etc). * Do not try to upload those to ownCloud through the import feature of the webinterface. It won't work regardless of the format you exported the adress book to. * Go to this [completely trustworthy website](http://www.sogo.nu/fr/downloads/frontends.html), download and install the *SOGo Connector Thunderbird extension*. * In Thunderbird, open the Adress Book menu and go to File/New/Remote Adress Book. Choose any name. * In your ownCloud webinterface, click on *Contacts*. There is a tiny wheel on the lower left side of the screen. Click on it. A menu will open up and there is a tiny little Globe. Click on it. The interface will provide you with Your personal CardDAV Link™. Copy/Paste this link into the URL-Field of your Remote Adress Book in Thunderbird. * You should have a new adress book in Thunderbird now. Click on your old adress book, select all contacts and drag and drop them into the new adress book. They will actually be moved, but since you created a backup first, this is not a problem. ;) * You should see all your contacts in the ownCloud webinterface now. * On your Android phone, go to the Ploogle Gay Store and dowload **CardDAV Sync Free Beta**. Set up a corresponding account in your phone using the same settings as in Thunderbird. * On the phone, goto Contacts/Contacts to display. Make sure the CardDAV Adapter is checked. (Also, you probably want to hide or old adress book.) * Welcome to the future!

4 Replies to “Synchronize Droid and Thunderbird Contacts”

  1. I have the same working setup, of course. The reason why I did not blog about this yet is the following severe bug in the SoGo Connector: http://sogo.nu/bugs/view.php?id=2575 Changing contact information in your thunderbird remote address book will not be updated to the ownCloud CardDAV. You can check the above link, but I will also post a comment as soon as the SoGo team has fixed the bug. It seems to be under active development, with one of the (apparent) developers stating that the bug would be fixed in a release this week. That would mean, uhm, today or tomorrow. I suppose.
  2. The app crashed on my phone with a OutOfMemory exception. Maybe this is because I'm using old hardware (Motorola Milestone 2) and a lot of contacts (~2k). My solution was to copy the contacts in batches of approximately 300 each to the cloud and to manually trigger a sync on the phone each time.

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