This morning I discovered that I have more than 1000 contacts in my "Personal Address book" within Thunderbird. What the he*k? Why are there so many duplicates, addresses from spammers, mailing lists etc. I definitely never added to my Personal Address Book? Seems to be mixed with the "Collected Addresses", where Thunderbird collects all this crap for me. But why?I'm using the Sync Kolab plugin to sync my addresses between various computers using IMAP - a smart way of using the protocol to keep contacts in sync. Unfortunately I made a mistake when I setup Sync Kolab on a new computer - I mixed up "Collected Addresses" and "Personal Address book" which caused the mess. Not a big deal to fix - just change the settings, remove unwanted addresses and sync again. But wait - Sync Kolab does not really sync! It just adds addresses, but it never removes them. It also does not seem to detect obvious duplicates (same name, same address, same fields!). As soon as I start the sync process the locally removed addresses are added back to my Address Book. Not very smart. Resetting all the IMAP data does not work as well - the other computers will again add all the addresses.
So what are the alternatives to Sync Kolab? One option is to wait until Thunderbird 3 is released (end of 2008), as it supports the usage of the Mac Address Book. Which syncs itself using me.com. Which does real syncing including deletions and works flawlessy so far. There are costs involved, but that's fine as the syncronization between the Macs and the iPhone is really worth the money. Of course then switching to the Mac Mail application is an option as well, unfortunately it does not support everything Thunderbird does - Mac Mail seems to be more "basic" - but I'll leave that open for a future blog post. In the meanwhile feel free to research on your own.
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