Monday 13th March 2006
Thunderbird and LDAP
Got an LDAP-based address book up and running at work, using ConTagged as mentioned on Friday as the contact editor. It turns out that Thunderbird only uses the first value for the mail attribute returned from the LDAP server and ignores any others, which is rather unfortunate. In order to ensure that the "business" address is always the lucky winner of the email address lottery (no, not a 419 scam), we've implemented a workaround of having the "business" email address written with the localpart starting with a capital letter and all other email addresses written with lowercase localparts. This takes advantage of the reality that virtually all email systems have case-insensitive localparts even though they don't need to, and that OpenLDAP returns attributes sorted by value, so the uppercase addresses are always first. It doesn't help Thunderbird users that want to know the "other" addresses though.